From: "Andrew S. Townley" <ast@...>
Date: 2009-04-29T20:33:42+09:00
Subject: Re: JRuby constructor issue or just me?

On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 02:44 +0900, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
> Andrew S. Townley wrote:
> > While convenient, and certainly "more ruby-like", I'm not really sure
> > that doing all of the automagic method translation stuff is actually all
> > that necessary, and, since it's difficult to do for all cases without
> > adding even more overhead, maybe might just be simpler to avoid.
> 
> Yes, we did make a modification in JRuby 1.1.5 or so to allow 
> implementing interface methods with underscore names, but that never got 
> into the class-extending code (which is way more complicated). We're 
> really tight on resources to work on this stuff, but we're hoping to do 
> another pass over the summer to complete the already-started rewrite of 
> the whole Java integration layer. This sort of gap will be remedied then 
> as well.

Sounds good.  Hopefully the changing of the guard won't interfere with
this. :)

> > Glad it did turn out to be just me, but a more accurate error message
> > would be nice.
> > 
> > Actually, as I was going to write the rest, I just figured out why I hit
> > the problem.  Action is an accessor of JButton.  Since I used the same
> > name, silent collision, the compiler's happy, but it's obviously still
> > somewhat confused.  Not really sure what message I'd expect, but I still
> > think the current message is misleading.
> 
> There's actually a bug in our tracker to improve error messages 
> throughout Java integration code, since I know it can be very 
> frustrating. The current code is unfortunately the product of almost 8 
> years of people poking it this way and that without ever completing a 
> full refactoring. But we're untangling it bit by bit and making 
> improvements with every release. We're also more than willing to help 
> folks like you sort out remaining issues.

That's both very obvious and much appreciated.  Thanks.

> And probably the biggest thing you could do to help us would be to 
> contribute simple specs/tests for behaviors you discover and behaviors 
> that aren't working like you expect, so we can continue to build out a 
> set of expectations we need to meet.

Can you point me to the best documentation on how to do this?  I'm happy
to help with the cases I've seen so far.

Cheers,

ast
-- 
Andrew S. Townley <ast@atownley.org>
http://atownley.org