I found this thread by accident. I know that it is quite old, but it raises an interesting topic I'm very familiar with. Disclaimer: I founded
Numiton, a company whose main product is a migration tool from PHP to Java called PtoJ. We've already done the migration of a couple of open-source PHP projects, showcased at
numiton.org, so please allow me to share some insights.
A client-sided Programming language like Java offers totally different options than a server-sided scripting language as PHP, so you would code a web gallery project in a totally different way than you code PHP.
I beg to disagree, since Java is the most used on the server side. Not for open-source projects, granted, but rather for enterprise applications.
I can't see how you would be "porting" Coppermine to client-sided Java.
Doing the porting is in fact pretty straightforward. What is difficult is to optimize the code to become Java-like (think of type inference, strict variable scoping etc.). Additionally, an emulation in Java of the PHP runtime is required.
Porting the (server-sided) PHP code to jsp would theoretically be an option, but I doubt that it would be a good idea for one person to start such a huge task: Coppermine consists of 10,000s lines of code in hundreds of files - I can't see how one person could possible accomplish this.
Manual porting is a too large undertake, no matter how big the team would be. But automatically it is very much possible as I said it above.
I recommend looking for a gallery script that already has been written in Java or starting a new script that mimmicks the functionality of coppermine, yet is based on vanilla code.
@Pascal: I understand that you're very enthusiastic for the coppermine project, yet a Java port would be no real benefit for the coppermine community imo, as server-sided Java (jsp) is only available for a very small number of people.
I have yet to find a reasonably working open-source gallery project in Java. However, porting Coppermine to Java is something to be carefully examined. When you do a port you end up with a pure-Java application with the same open-source license as the original PHP application. But you lose the community gathered around the PHP application (developers, contributors, users). So unless you are committed to developing the newly ported project by yourself or can live with a frozen project, the port does not really make sense.