kyotocabinet-java

This is a Ruby gem providing a JRuby interface for the Kyoto Cabinet database library. It aims to provide an identical interface to the official Ruby library. However, that library uses Ruby's C extension API and thus does not work under JRuby. This is instead implemented atop Kyoto Cabinet's Java API, with a minimal Ruby adaptation layer to compensate for interface differences.

Prerequisites

Installation of this gem requires that Kyoto Cabinet (>= 1.2.76) already be installed. See the installation notes for platform-specific instructions. It also requires a C++ compiler and JDK, since it contains a patched copy of the kyotocabinet-java library, which will be compiled upon installation. It does not attempt to install anything outside the RubyGems directory.

Installation

$ gem install kyotocabinet-java

Or, if you're using Bundler and want your Ruby code to be able to transparently use Kyoto Cabinet under MRI or JRuby, you might want to add something like this to your Gemfile:

gem "kyotocabinet-ruby", "~> 1.27.1", :platforms => [:mri, :rbx]
gem "kyotocabinet-java", "~> 0.2.0", :platforms => :jruby

Usage

This is designed to be a drop-in replacement for kyotocabinet-ruby, and so usage should be identical:

require 'kyotocabinet'
db = KyotoCabinet::DB.new
db.open("%", KyotoCabinet::DB::OWRITER | KyotoCabinet::DB::OCREATE)
db["hello"] = "world"

Status

This library was written to maintain indexes for a BioRuby MAF parser. It works for that purpose but has not been exhaustively tested. Other parts of the Kyoto Cabinet API might need some work. The bioruby-maf code relies on storing binary data in Kyoto Cabinet; this works with the Java API methods accepting or returning byte[], but not their String counterparts. Some of these methods have been wrapped to explicitly convert arguments and return values to byte arrays, but not all. See kyotocabinet.rb for examples. Feel free to submit pull requests.

Installation has been tested on Mac OS X 10.7.4 and Debian wheezy, and should work on Ubuntu and Fedora as well. Please report build problems on other Unix platforms; it should be fairly easy to resolve them.

It's not completely clear what it would take to make this work on Windows; shipping a pre-built JAR and the binary DLL provided by FAL Labs might do it. Patches would be welcome.

Contributing to kyotocabinet-java