On 10/11/05, Brion Vibber <brion@pobox.com> wrote:
Justin Conover wrote:
> Anyone thought about converting beagle(mono) to java, is it possible
> with some changes to the code?  I saw something months back about the
> diffs between java/mono and how it is possible to write apps for both
> without much pain, I'm not a developer and don't really know enough
> about java atm to say yes/no ;-)
>
> Just thought if it is possible, that would be a good project since
> fedora/rh doesn't want to go down the mono route for what i think are
> good reasons.
>
> For example, didn't Wikipedia mv from GCJ and Lucene to Mono and
> Dotlucene?  I don't know if there is any similarity between DotLucene
> and Beagle, but if Lucene does some kind of indexing/searching would it
> be possible to write some kind of Lucene interface to index dir on a
> desktop?

DotLucene is a C# port of Java Lucene; the API is the same (modulo the
silly .NET case conventions). Lucene itself is an indexing and retrieval
engine, basically a database targetted at text searching.

Wikipedia's search engine is a relatively small networked daemon with a
bit of wrapper code, so it was easy to move from Java to C# and would be
easy to move back. (My biggest problem with GCJ, and the reason I
switched that app to C#/Mono, has been memory leaks. Possibly this is
from heap fragmentation, I hope to find the time to investigate it
someday...)

Beagle uses DotLucene too, but there's a lot more code around it,
including all the indexing, file monitoring, file format readers, user
interface, desktop integration... I'm sure it could be ported to Java,
but it seems like it would be a lot of wasted effort just because some
folks at Red Hat don't want to ship free software from Novell. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

As far as wasted effort, how many of the mono apps  are duplicates of software that is already out there?