________________________________________________________________________

This file is part of Logtalk <https://logtalk.org/>  
Copyright 1998-2018 Paulo Moura <pmoura@logtalk.org>

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
________________________________________________________________________


The library Java entities define a minimal abstraction for calling Java
from Logtalk. This abstraction makes use of Logtalk parametric objects
and allows creating Java object, accessing Java class fields, and calling
Java class and object methods using a more Logtalk-like syntax. It also
gives access to some Java utility predicates.

This abstraction was developed primarily to work with the JPL library
bundled with SWI-Prolog and YAP. However, it's expected to be implementable
with alternative Java interfaces found in other backend Prolog compilers.
Currently, a preliminary implementation is also available for JIProlog.

The main idea in this abstraction layer is to use parametric objects where
the first parameter holds the Java reference (usually to a class or object)
and an optional second parameter holds the return value. Together with a
forward message handler, this allows the use of Java messages with the same
functor and number of arguments as found in the relevant JavaDocs.

For usage examples and unti tests, see the `java` example.
