[Biojava-l] ProcessTools news

[Francois Pepin]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to have people's opinions on some of the changes that I did to
it:
The code has been switched from Input/OutputStreams to Reader/Writer. Do
people want to be able to define a particular charset when the transfer
is done? Right now the default charset is being used.

The code asks for Writer for stdout and stderr instead of StringBuffer.
Giving a StringWriter is much the same as giving a StringBuffer (you can
recover a StringBuffer from it). Would people really want to be able to
send a StringBuffer directly?

Same for the Reader for the input. You can send a StringReader to do
much the same, but would people want to be able to send a String
directly?

The advantage of the changes are 2 fold:
1- It avoids the deprecation of StringBufferInputStream.
2- It allows to define arbitrary inputs and outputs, not just
String(Buffer). For example, sending a huge output to a file directly.

I personally think that the class in a good shape now (I hope no one has
started using the API that I just broke yet).

Francois

On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 07:27, Thomas Down wrote:
> Hi...
> 
> There seems to be quite a bit of interest in this subject, so
> I thought I'd post an update.
> 
> Francois Pepin has kindly merged in some functionality from
> ExecRunner.  You can now specify a single command line
> String, instead of an arguments array, and on Windows
> platforms that will be processed using the appropriate
> shell.
> 
> I've also added a timeout facility to kill long-running jobs.
> This is slightly different from ExecRunner: timeouts are
> specified when calling the ProcessTools.exec method, and
> you get a ProcessTimeoutException if the time limit is
> exceeded.  This is implemented using a `time bomb' pattern,
> which should be very efficient on any platform that has
> a vaguely sane threading library, so I'd encourage anyone
> writing pipeline-type code to consider setting sensible timeouts
> on their processes.
> 
> There are a few (Unix-centric) examples in demos/process/
> 
>     Thomas.
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