Perforce pure Java API

Perforce have released a 100% pure Java client-side API (in beta status).

I've used several of the other Perforce client APIs before, including the Ruby and Python APIs. Generally, these APIs work by invoking the Perforce command-line tool (p4) in "-ztag" mode, and then parsing the returned output.

Based on those ideas, I built my own small client-side Java API by spawning p4 from my own Java code, and parsing the output. It is simple and straightforward and works great. However, it is code that I have to maintain myself.

Unlike these other APIs, it appears that the new Java API is a complete implementation of the client-side Perforce networking protocol, so it speaks directly to the server without requiring the command-line tool to be installed and run by the API libraries.

I don't currently need to make heavy use of writing wrappers and tools which automate Perforce commands, and my current code is pretty stable, so there's no rush, but the next time I need to write any code like this, I will certainly investigate the Perforce P4Java API in more detail, as it looks quite nice.

Here's the javadoc.

For example, a common task that I do with my current code is to get a short description of a submitted changelist, and format it nicely for display in my UI. It seems like this would be quite straightforward in the new API, requiring little more than:

 P4Server p4Svr = P4ServerFactory.getServer(...);
 P4Changelist myCL = p4Svr.getChangelist(12345);
 ... access myCL.getDescription(), myCL.getFiles(), etc. ...

This is about as clean as I could possibly want; off the top of my head it looks ideal. Yay Perforce!