[armedbear-devel] Folding Lisp application code into a JAR file in the Java CLASSPATH

[Alessio Stalla]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 12:56 PM, Mark Evenson <evenson at panix.com> wrote:
> On 1/12/10 5:07 AM, Olsen, Peter C. wrote:
>> Ladies and Gentlemen,
>>
>> Is there an elegant way to have ABCL load Lisp code from a JAR file in the
>> Java CLASSPATH?
>
> Unfortunately, not yet.
>
> As it stands, "naked" ABCL really doesn't interact with the Java
> CLASSPATH in any meaningful way for Lisp objects.
>
> Once I get the the JAR file support working again, I could easily add
> the following meaning to
>
>   CL-USER> (load "jar:file:foo.jar!/a/b/bar.abcl")
>
> 1.  Resolve "foo.jar" with respect to *DEFAULT-PATHNAME-DEFAULTS*, and
> if it exists, attempt to load "a/b/bar.abcl".
>
> 2.  If resolution of "foo.jar" fails on the filesystem, iterate through
> the CLASSPATH to match the name.

I don't agree on point 2. Ideally I would like to keep the two points
distinct, i.e. cook up another pseudo-pathname - say,
"classpath:/a/b/foo.abcl" - specifically for classpath resources. The
reason is that I see two very distinct usages of this functionality:

2. (classpath) is what applications would normally use: just ensure
that resources are in the classpath, ignore where they are physically
located;
1. (explicit jar path) would normally be used by ABCL itself in order
to correctly resolve relative paths, load internal stuff, and similar.

imho, of course.

Bye,
Alessio