Package it.unimi.dsi.arscif

This package provides Java support for handling asynchronous remote-script callback invocations.

See:
Description

Interface Summary

ARSCIFList	The Java counterpart of an array literal.
ARSCIFListIterator	An universal number iterator.
ARSCIFMap	The Java counterpart of an object literal.

Class Summary

ARSCIF	Defines static methods supporting ARSCIF.
ARSCIFArrayList	An implementation based on array lists of the ARSCIF list interface.
ARSCIFOpenHashMap	An implementation based on open hash maps of the ARSCIF map inteface.

Package it.unimi.dsi.arscif Description

This package provides Java support for handling asynchronous remote-script callback invocations.

Interfacing a server-side scripting language with ARSCIF requires two essential pieces: a way to translate canonical ECMAScript literals into a variable, and a way to create a canonical ECMASCript literal out of a variable. The former is fundamental to recover the argument of a call, the latter to produce the arguments for the callback. The two processes must be rigorously inverse to each other.

As a commodity, we provide also a way to recover the argument of a call and to perform the callback.

Data Structures

Exchanging data with a language that has dynamic types is a bit complicated in Java: all data structures must be able to accommodate heterogeneous data.

This package provides interfaces that parallel ECMAScript arrays and ECMAScript objects, and corresponding implementations. They allow to store heterogeneous data, but also to access any of their element with useful methods that return directly a primitive type (e.g., IntList.getInt(int)). The name of the methods follow fastutil conventions.

More importantly, ARSCIFList implements all type-specific list interfaces. This means, that, for instance, if you know that such a list is entirely made of integers, you can just use toIntArray() to obtain the corresponding integer array. In fact, you can do that even if the element of the list are just numbers (i.e., subclasses of Number)—they will be converted for you.

On the opposite side, the literal creation methods accept any data structure implementing the List or Map interfaces (albeit in the latter case keys must be character sequences). Any subclass of Number will be coded as a number, and any class implementing CharSequence will be coded as a string.

Note that fastutil provides easy-to-use wrapping methods that makes it trivial to create lists (and thus literals) out of arrays of primitive types.

Dependencies

ARSCIF uses fastutil for high-performance containers and algorithms, and MG4J for its most useful class MutableString. Note that MG4J has further dependencies, but they are not needed if you just use MutableString.