Getting to SWIFT

Image by ucumari via Flickr

SWIFT has been a background idea. Ultimately what is needed is a means of generating a message with known input as well as checking a received message against some expectations. After running into WIFE last year I figured that the process was imminently simplified. Time, however, can be a nasty thing.

With two projects boiling away with furious vigor, it has become time to get the basic SWIFT message validation tool written. This is not due to father time having changed his ways but both systems I'm working with showing an impending need for it.

I must say there's been an auspicious start... the OS library hadn't been touched in a while. Not much to fear though since SWIFT doesn't change all that often. False confidence on my part. After popping a sample into Eclipse all that would return was a simple class not found error.

Yay for open source in that I could pop the source into a project and try figure it out. Turns out that there was a dependency on Java 1.4. Ultimately a simple update to the Java version and the classes can no longer hide from the compiler.

So now I just need to figure out how the library works... It would probably help to get a good understanding of how SWIFT messages are put together before doing this, but the clock is ticking. Heck now that I have undone my assumption that the newlines between tags within the message fields are simply there for readability the way forward is looking almost too good to be true.