From Tim McCune Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 00:52:08 -0500 >JTB Questionnaire >----------------- > >1. Please provide a short description of JTB as a recommendation to > someone who has never seen or used it before. Need to build a parse tree in Java? Get JTB. It saved me from writing hundreds of lines of code. >2. How would you classify your use of JTB? What kind of work are you > doing or have you done using JTB? I just needed a simple way to build a parse tree out of terms that users enter into our keyword search engine on the web. My grammer is pretty short, just consisting of terms connected by and's, or's, and not's, and bounded by parens. >3. What is your opinion on JTB? Did you find the tool useful? Please > rate it on a scale from 1 to 10 (worst to best). I rate it a 9. The learning curve was very steep, but I think it was more javacc that gave me problems than JTB. I should have read the docs about lookahead before I even started, because that gave me a lot of trouble. Learning JTB was not nearly as tough. It is well documented. Maybe you could provide some javacc tips in your documentation, since you seem to do a better job than the javacc authors. Overall, it took me about a week from the time I found JTB to the time I had a working tree builder. I found the tool extremely useful. >4. Have you used other similar tools such as JJTree or ANTLR (specifically, > the tree-building aspect of it)? I tried jjtree, but the documentation was confusing, and I really didn't like the fact that you had to start from a .jjt file, which is different than a .jj file. The fact that JTB takes .jj files as input is a big plus. I messed around with ANTLR a bit before I found javacc, but it seemed even more confusing than javacc. >5. If you answered yes to number 4, how would you compare JTB with > these other tools? Again, please rate it from 1 to 10 in comparison and > include anything you have to say, including comments on ease of use, Guess I already answered that. JTB is much easier to learn, a much simpler model, a much more useful model, and has better documentation. I can't really rate the other tools, since I didn't really use them. >6. Please include below any other comments you have regarding JTB. Feel > free to include any suggestions for improvement. Thank you for a great product. You saved me a lot of pain and suffering on my project. If you'd like to see the finished result, check out http://www.lib.ksu.edu/depts/issa/phds . The documentation is not done yet, but the first two text boxes there may contain search terms of the syntax that I described earlier. It's on kind of a slow box right now, but we hope to remedy that very soon. One suggestion: Advertise more! Get linked to by some of the big indexes out there like Gamelan. It took me forever to find out about JTB.