What is NaJA ?

NaJA stands for Native C++ Java-like API. The Java API is is a rich, standard and quite good design object library. There is no complete equivalent usable directly with C++. C++ developers must reuse old C libraries or a big set of C++ libraries, each with its own design. This make C++ difficult and code not as readable as it should be. The main NaJA goal is to provide what standard ANSI C++ library and STL don't.

NaJA also intends to bring C++ as easy as java can be while letting hackers free to decide whenever they need assistance (and then, accept some limitations, no magic!) or not. Not providing at all pointers and multiple inheritance because they are hard to use is not a solution !

NaJA features

Automatic memory management

Garbage collection is one of the nicest feature of java, and memory management is often the main problem to get C/C++ programs work well. So NaJA includes a tiny garbage collection. Tiny, because it is not as transparent as it could be. It is designed to be as simplest as possible and optional : use it when you want even if there remind some work to complete this goal.

package

Packages can help software designers to structure sources files, libraries. C++ namespaces can be an equivalent and helps prevent from ambiguous class names. But java packages brings a special class member visibility : package private (this is the default when none visibility is given). This is very useful and complete nicely in most cases where C++ friend keyword can't. NaJA provides the package_private macro to offer this facility.

Container templates

There is no really need for new templates since STL availability. NaJA templates are not so good, they just reuse NaJA tiny garbage collector for memory management and have the same interface than Java ones. Then as those containers became templates, those awful systematic static casting as java's containers only manage the root Object class.

Threads, socket, graphic toolkit...

Progressively, all standard tools provided with java API will have a NaJA equivalent. It's a colossal job and all help is welcome.

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