Speech Dispatcher Java Bindings

[Tomas Cerha]

Hello,

we just discussed the possibility of inclusion of Java Bindings in the
Speech Dispatcher codebase and we would like to hear the opinions of
others, especially of the author of Java bindings, Rui Batista.

The java bindings are currently in a separate git repository
speechd-java at git.freebsoft.org.  We would like to know if Rui plans
to further develop and maintain the code.  It will probably need some
work to make this code compliant with current SD releases.

If Rui or someone plans to work on that, it might make sense to treat it
similarly as other existing SD client libraries.  We considered the
advantages of having client libraries in the common source tree as the
server and the possibility of their separation.  Python, C, Guile and
Common lisp are now in the tree.  Java is separate now and actually,
there is also the Emacs Lisp library implemented in speechd-el.

The separate/common aproach makes difference in several aspects, but all
of them may become advantages or disadvantages depending on the
situation.  These aspects are:

  * development coordination
  * maintenance overhead
  * commit rights management
  * release synchronization
  * version dependencies

There are probably more.  We currently incline to the belief that having
all bindings in the common source tree is better, especially because of
lower maintenance overhead.  Thus we would be for inclusion of the Java
binding in the speechd repository.  Other option would be to separate
all client libraries into separate repos with their own independent
comitters/maintainers, release cycle, version numbers etc.

Looking forward to your comments.

Tomas