As the leader of Apache Harmony, Geir Magnusson Jr, said, Intel will donate a Swing/AWT implementation for the Apache Harmony project. “Today during our JavaOne talk (given by Tim and I) I was proud to demonstrate JEdit running on Harmony! That’s right, with Swing/AWT code. The formal contribution is on it’s way, and I don’t wish to steal any more thunder from the contribution when it’s made, but we (Intel hat on here…) wasn’t able to make the donation in time for the talk today because of internal process loose ends, and I wanted to make a splash for us at JavaOne. I expect it will be here in the next couple of days.”
Posted May 20, 2006 19:50 UTC (Sat) by guest audriusa
This is basically only general talks. The Swing donation is not comitted, so why we should think and react as if it is comitted? Probably it is too early to raise any discussion on this topic.
This would be great if it were finalized, though.
For some reason I just can’t stop thinking that this is soooo wrong. For all these years nobody had much interest in free Java but now that Gnu Classpath FINALY got their stuff almost done Intel (I didn’t even know they had an AWT/Swing) donates an implementation to Harmony?
To top it all of, Sun talks about Open Sourcing their Java version (with just a smidgen of sincerity this time I hope). Hell if things go on this way we will have 3 versions Java Classpath, more then a handful of Java compilers and dozens of VMs, all FLOSS, before the end of the year.
I’m having a hard time understanding how NOT Open Sourcing Java prevented a splintering in Java community, maybe somebody can clarify that for me?
The GNU Classpath project is an attempt to implement the Java API fully (as in all the classes that are distributed with Sun’s run time). GCJ wants to add full Java support to the GCC project. The Harmony project is an attempt to have a complete (compiler + VM + API) free JavaEE implementation.
These are 3 separate projects that aim to do different things. They all share resources too. There’s no ‘splintering’ in the Java community. I think Sun’s concern was that Java would fork into different incompatible implementations. Since these 3 projects all incorporate each other’s work to a certain degree and all depend on each other’s work, I don’t see how their paths could diverge.
Java is going from a one implementation language to a multiple implementation language witch constitutes a “splintering” of sorts and the code flow between Harmony and Gnu Classpath up to date should be about zilch since both projects are part of organizations with rather draconian licensing tendencies (both appear to amount to the dogma: all your code are belonging to us).
The second best thing would have been if Gnu and Apache had gotten together and formed a third project to produce a fully free SDK under, say the MIT license (should be acceptable to both), but that didn’t happen.
So now you have all these projects and they are not going away, and no, it doesn’t mater that Harmony wants to implement a full SDK, if XYZ VM wants to use Harmony’s Classpath rather then Gnu’s it will because it can. If Sun opens it stuff into the mix will have a nice stew of parts, like I said, and people will throw them together in all sorts of ways.
All because, in my opinion, Sun got cold feat about sharing after MS came out with J++ (don’t see how Sun won that one considering C# and J#, especially J#, exist).
Wouldn’t it have been nice if Java would have been FLOSS all along? No Harmony, no Gnu Classpath just an implementation by Sun you can get binaries or source for so you can run it on dinky OS with a user base of 4 too.
After all when was the last time you heard of a Gnu Python or Apache Perl effort?
From reading your posts, I think you do not understand why people in the Java community are against diluting the Java name which could happen if it was open sourced. Imagine everything called Java but didn’t fully adhere to the Java specification. That was essentially what happend with Visual J++ which called itself a Java development environment, but extended it by adding Windows Foundation Classes(WFC) and didn’t implement Swing. Developers using that product would have been forced to either develop in AWT which was rather primitive, or use WFC and other windows related technologies that weren’t related to Java, and were thus only limited to Microsoft’s platform.
In essence, what the Java community fears, is the creation of many incompatible versions of the JVM all claiming to be Java, but being incompatible with one another. As it is, all the free and open implementations of Java aim to be compatible with Sun’s Java. However, due to the different stages of maturity of these VMs, you still aren’t able to take a Java 1.5 program and just run it on a VM like Kaffe.
Making Java open source isn’t important for Java’s success (it is already successful). The people who are already using Java don’t really care if Java is open sourced or not. Only a very vocal minority of the Java community is interested in an open sourced Java. Most developers are happy with the current Java licensing, where you can download binaries for free, and if you’re interested you can download the source code for free and submit patches back to Sun. Open sourcing Java brings nothing to the table, aside from placating some of the more vocal parts of the community.
I’m calling bullshit on you.
Visual J++ didn’t implement Swing because it didn’t exist back then and it doesn’t implement Swing now because it isn’t allowed to. Sun sued MS over J++, it won and MS was forced to stop updating J++, thereby freezing J++ at Java 1.1.4 and Swing didn’t become an official part of Java until 1.2!
You say I don’t understand why people in the Java community are against diluting the Java name? Could it just be I interpret things differently? You say nobody but a small minority care about Open Sourcing Java? Could it just be that I want an up to date and working Java installation on my Fedora or Debian or whatever box without having to jump through all sorts of hoops?
There is no code flow atm between Harmony and Classpath.
I’ve elaborated on that (and why the MIT compromise was rejected by the ASF) here: http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=14198&comment_id=110641
I expect that to change in FSF’s direction once GPLv3 makes the Apache License v2 GPL-compatible.
For all these years nobody had much interest in free Java but now that Gnu Classpath FINALY got their stuff almost done Intel (I didn’t even know they had an AWT/Swing) donates an implementation to Harmony?
Classpath has a GPL+exceptions license. Although I consider it a better license than LGPL, there are large segments of development that won’t touch any GPL license because of various reasons – one being that lawyers have a hard time nailing down an exact interpretation of it.
But it’ll be interesting to see what happens when and if Sun open sources Java. Personally, I no longer have any interest in the Java langauge. It’s verbosity leads to syntactic clutter that decreases my readability of it. But I would be interested in a JVM that has the capability to be a good platform for functional and dynamic languages.
But I would be interested in a JVM that has the capability to be a good platform for functional and dynamic languages.
How would open sourceing Java contribute towards this goal? You have always been able to download the specification for Java byte code. Back in my undergraduate days, we wrote a compiler for some pseudo language that compiled source code into byte code in order to run on the JVM.
If the JVM in its current form isn’t suitable for functional and dynamic languages (seen the Java implementation of Python called Jython?), how does open sourcing it help?
http://incubator.apache.org/harmony/faq.html
Open sourcing Java brings nothing to the table, aside from placating some of the more vocal parts of the community.
Bullchunder.
If if there was an opensource java with a reasonably priced accreditation proceedure, *BSD’s would have had JVM’s long ago; but thanks to SUN’s diddling around, the FreeBSD Foundation has be stuffed around my SUN’s stalling when it comes to providing accreditation of their port of Java, and worse, the cost of getting it accredited is out of this world.
Pulease, if SUN wishes to be a ‘partner’, how about not only opensourcing their java under a more acceptable policy, like the CDDL, which doesn’t require registration, anal probe and signing of contracts simply to get to the source – and better still, make their ‘compatibility’ testing software free of charge!
SUN wishes to get their java platform on as many operating systems as possible? then how about lowering the bar to entry when it comes to the costs and accessibility to the source code.
If if there was an opensource java with a reasonably priced accreditation proceedure, *BSD’s would have had JVM’s long ago; but thanks to SUN’s diddling around, the FreeBSD Foundation has be stuffed around my SUN’s stalling when it comes to providing accreditation of their port of Java, and worse, the cost of getting it accredited is out of this world.
How many people are keen on running Java on FreeBSD? How has the lack of Java on FreeBSD impeded the growth of Java?
Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to get Java running on alternative OSes too. I dual boot PPC Linux on my Powerbook for fun and it would be nice to have a good, up to date JVM from Sun instead of having to only rely on Kaffe or IBM’s JVM (which incidentally is only a server VM).
Fact is, most Java developers do not care about marginal operating systems. Would it be nice if Java ran on more things? Sure. Is it a show stopper that it doesn’t? No.
How many people are keen on running Java on FreeBSD? How has the lack of Java on FreeBSD impeded the growth of Java?
[…]
Fact is, most Java developers do not care about marginal operating systems. Would it be nice if Java ran on more things? Sure. Is it a show stopper that it doesn’t? No.
Actually, I think FreeBSD is a good example where it matters. FreeBSD is very popular as a webserver, and application servers like Tomcat, Jonas, and JBoss are natural fits there. Sure, it is possible to run some or all application servers with Kaffe or gij, but some companies prefer to rely on Sun’s JDK. Making the JDK opensource will ease things up here a lot. It won’t be the end of the world. Sun still holds all trademarks, and can decide which ports or binary distributions can officially be called a “Java Development Kit”.
>From reading your posts, I think you do not understand why people in the Java community are against diluting the Java name which could happen if it was open sourced. Imagine everything called Java but didn’t fully adhere to the Java specification.
From reading your post, i think you don’t understand how law works. The license of the software Sun Java has nothing to do with the naming of other software projects. The naming is about trademarks, if sun holds the trademark of “Java” they can decide who can use the name “Java” and who don’t whether the software Sun Java uses a proprietary license or a free license.
Swing and AWT are not very good options to develop GUI’s with. The use of Java with GTK and Glade is a more sane option that is crossplatform and renders better than Swing.
http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/bin/view