Re: Elisp as Java Client

[Paul Kinnucan <paulk@mathworks.com>]

Phillip Lord <p.lord@russet.org.uk> writes:

> >>>>> "Siegfried" == Siegfried Heintze <siegfried@heintze.com> writes:
> 
>   Siegfried> Well not everyone was enthralled with the concept as
>   Siegfried> ELisp as COM client.  What about elisp as a java client?
>   Siegfried> Has anyone done that?
> 
>   Siegfried> It would sure be great to use eclisps plugins from emacs!
> 
> This can be done. The JDEE has a significant amount of talk between
> java, and lisp, although its  mostly lisp calling java, rather than
> vice versa. 


The JDEE combines a Lisp interpreter (Emacs) and a Java interpreter
(the BeanShell), each running as a separate process and communicating
with the other via process I/O. The JDEE talks to the Beanshell in
Java and the Beanshell talks back to Emacs in Elisp. More
specifically, the JDEE sends Java expressions to the BeanShell for
evaluation that invoke Java methods developed specifically for use
with the JDEE.  The Java methods pass results back to Emacs by
printing Lisp expressions to standard out. The Lisp expressions
typically invoke Lisp functions that perform JDEE-related tasks. A
listener on the JDEE-side simply passes the Lisp expressions to the
Emacs Lisp interpreter for evaluation. The interface is very simple
and flexible and has been used to create some elaborate features, such
as field and method completion, that combine Java and Lisp code.

Paul