“Anything that can be done, could be done ‘meta'” (© Charles Simonyi) is right up there with “Laziness, impatience and hubris” (© Larry Wall) as pithy description of my development philosophy. Also, unfortunately, there’s another one: “Once it’s clear how toproceed, why bother to proceed” (or something like that). So, with that in mind…

I wanted a Python client library for GData (thankfully, they released
one last week, so this is moot — good!), so I thought of automagically converting the Java library to Python. I tried Java2Python, but it’s based on ANTLR grammar for Java 1.4, and the library, of course, is in Java 5. As I was relearning ANTLR and writing all these actions by hand (the pain!), I took a break and found
Java 1.5 parser with AST generation and visitor suport by Julio Gesser (no relation,
I presume?) and Sreenivasa Viswanadha, based on JavaCC. Aha! Much easier… But then, of course, Google releases the Python version of the library I needed in the first place, so I don’t bother wrapping this project up… Here it is for whoever wants it: http://code.google.com/p/j2p/.