GNU Classpath now features more efficient painting for large Free Swing GUIs. Improved
accessibility support. HttpURLConnection rewrite. Official CORBA
VMCID assigned. Start of RMI over IIOP support. Qt4 support for
OS-X. Much improved Free Swing Metal theme. Free Swing Demo includes
theme switcher example (Metal, Ocean, GNU). JBoss now starts up and
Jonas testsuite passes for 95%. Support for the javax.sound.midi
framework and experimental DSSI and ALSA service providers. Early
version of the popular StAX API. Now has 96% coverage of 1.4 API.
I knew classpath was being developed, but 96% of coverage of the 1.4 API…looks like most of the simple java programs should work, shouldn’t it? IOW: Finally a true java replacement which makes java truly platform-independent (since Sun’s VM only supports a few platforms)
hot damn, that means a Free java plugin is well on its way!
How much will it take till 100%?
I think one of the developers said that with this pace the project should reach 100% in about a Month. But the pace will probably not hold and there was a nice blog on mono that said something like: if your tests reach 100% they are probably broken
There’s also this saying, the last 20% are 80% of the work…
But I don’t think it applies so much to a project like classpath
Unless they have saved the really hard stuff for last 🙂 (just a speculation btw)
As far as I know the tests that are referred to here are for API coverage, not completeness, accuracy or speed.
Basically, 100% = we have at least some implementation of all of the APIs that java 1.4 does.
>As far as I know the tests that are referred to here are for API coverage, not completeness, accuracy or speed.
Yes, the tests count stubs for the score, but there is someone working to fix that.
Sun has its own specification for implementing a Java VM. http://java.sun.com/docs/books/vmspec/
They also have a test suite that validates a VM implementation that they use to award the “Java” trademark to 3rd party VM implementors.
I assume the GNU Classpath at least uses this test suite as a benchmark for success. And presumably once it passes the suite it could apply to use the Java trademark.
Classpath isn’t a VM, it’s an implementation of the class library.
… GNU Classpath has mauve. http://sources.redhat.com/mauve/ for the code. http://gnu.wildebeest.org/diary/index.php?p=129 -> ~ 300 000 lines of code and growing
cheers,
dalibor topic
Actually, there are some issues with accessing Sun’s TCK, see http://www.advogato.org/person/robilad/diary.html?start=64 for more details. The coverage number is generated from japitools, an Open Source suite of combatability testing tools available at http://www.kaffe.org/~stuart/japi/ if you want to run it yourself. You’ll need to “japize” a copy of the Sun runtime to compare against, and there may be bugs in the tools, but it’s 100% reproducable.
How much will it take till 100%?
Ye know how the saying goes… the last 4% take up 96% of the time.
That’s not that stupid, since there’s usually some reason why that 4% are the last 4%.
Even better question– how long until 100% of Java 1.5?
this is an incredible achievement, much larger than the efforts of a compiler and runtime. congrats to the team who more than anyone else have made free java a reality
Correct me if I am wrong, but does Fedora Core use this for its out-of-the-box Java support, thus allowing it to run Eclipse and Open Office’s Java portions?
If this is the case, which would have been for a while, it is too bad that other distributions have yet to take up using GNU Classpath as their main Java system. I am thinking about Gentoo mainly here.
Yes. Fedora uses GCJ
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JavaFAQ
does the performance is better?
because eclispe (native) is slower than java
same thing for some test i do…
…together with gcj ( http://gcc.gnu.org/java/ , yes this will also COMPILE java! ), and now trolltech announced qt4-java-bindings ( http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/10/troll-tech-dev-days-05-in-san-jo… )
java might become my free language of choise (it already was my teachers teaching-language of choise)
good work!
Cies Breijs
Yes, afaik both fedora and debian already use gnu classpath to run e.g. eclipse. (The debian eclipse package was added just a week ago.)
…and those of us who will continue to use Sun’s implementation won’t have to listen to the bitching and whining of zealots. After all, do ICC face harassement by GCC people?
However, !.4 is an unfortunate target to have chosen given the substantial improvements in 1.5
Here is to more and better Java!
Don’t worry, 1.5 support is well under way, too. Check out the GNU Classpath mailing list for details.
cheers,
dalibor topic
finally – possibiloty of a consistent java across solaris, *BSD and linux.
Was the submission sent in by telegraph?
I’ve been developing Java 1.3/1.4 code with GNU Java related tools for a while now and I must say it’s quite nice already. It’s become to much a hassle to have to go to java.sun.com and get their special download of a jdk/jre. Having my distro of choice just grab the package off some pub server and install it all in one fluid motion really improves the whole work flow for me.
I tried my small application with jamvm and classpath 0.19 yesterday.
Command line part worked well. Small Swing client compiled and started but was not usable. Weird thing was, that text fields seemed to be all readonly, could not write anything there.
Thanks for testing. If your swing application is free software could you add it to http://developer.classpath.org/mediation/FreeSwingTestApps then our code monkeys will try it out and hopefully find the faults and fix them.
Otherwise could you report a bug with a small example to http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/bugs.html
Thanks
I’ve been using Java since 1.0b4 and I have switched my allegiance to mono (.Net). Yeah the crossplatform GUI isn’t all there yet, but it will be. I just hate how ugly the GUI code gets in java. It’s just not natural. For me, all this java stuff is about 5 years too late.
So you would rather ‘bet the farm’ on a MS (that’s M dollarsign) derived tech?
If you are using ASP.NET or ADO.NET you are using proprietary microsoft technology, not part of any standard.
See:
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono
You won’t have these kinds of problems with open source Java.