Yrs Java Bindings

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Hello,

some time ago I wanted to use Yjs in Java but I could not find any projects with Java bindings. Remembering what I learned in university some 7 or 8 years ago about JNI and (way more comfortable) JNA I looked into it.

While JNI may be a more performant way to access native code from Java, with JNA being said to be up to 13 times slower, I still decided to use JNA over JNI.
Using JNI is very, very … very time consuming - time I simply don’t have. Yrs is quite a big library.

For me, it was not a choice between JNA and JNI but rather between having Java bindings and not having Java bindings.

And there I went.

You already supply a C header for the library, so “all I had to do” was:

  • generate dynamic libraries for windows and linux using the yffi project (and hopefully mac soon)
  • find a generator for JNA Bindings because I was NOT going to do this by hand! (I ended up using JNAerator)
  • write a wrapper layer around the bindings so it is more comfortable for Java users

and then see what fails.

After fiddling around with this for a few more hours and making stuff work I began to like the idea of it. On the weekends and sometimes after work when I wasn’t too tired of writing Java all day already, I continued to work on it.

I’m still not finished or even close to being finished, but there is progress!

Having said all this, I now realize I probably overshared, lol.

Anyway, here is the link to the repo: GitHub - segreeeen/Yrs4J: Java Bindings for Yrs

I named it Yrs4J in the “funny” tradition of calling everything that is wrapped or ported to Java “4J”. I also published some maven packages to my nexus so it can be used easily.

I hope you like it.

If there are other Java people here who would like to contribute - please do!!

Best wishes!

SeGreeeen

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This is awesome :exploding_head: , thanks for sharing!!

Bartosz needs to see this

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This is amazing! We have a use case for manipulating ydocs from our clojure backend which we have been putting off due to the lack of a JVM API. I’m gonna play around with it for sure!

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Thanks to the two of you!

I’m so happy that you like it, just keep in mind that there is a lot that has not been implemented yet as a wrapper :sweat_smile:. You might have use the JNA Bindings directly, for some functionality. Anyway, I think I will steadily expand it until all the functionality is covered :slight_smile:

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