According to a news post on the Haiku project website, a new port team is being formed to bring Java technologies to the Haiku platform. The goal of the Haiku Java Team is to port OpenJDK to Haiku, and they would like to see the port included within the structure of Sun's OpenJDK project. The Haiku developers have already been in contact with members of the OpenJDK Porters Group to pursue their objective, and a formal proposal has also been submitted for consideration by the OpenJDK project. The Haiku Java Team is an initiative lead by Bryan Varner, who together with Andrew Bachmann worked on the port of Java to BeOS in the past (demo video).
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Member since:2005-07-07
Thanks for the adult tone Pacmania. Haiku has become fairly stable in the last year, thanks. And I don't see the problem of it being a clone of an 8 year old OS.
1) BeOS was ahead of its time.
2) Consider that the major new features in that time have been metadata searching, which was in BeOS, and graphics compositing, which isn't vital.
3) Haiku is not an exact clone. It contains important features that were never in R5.
In 2000/2001, OS X wasn't ready for mass-market. New Macs booted into OS 9!
Linux certainly wasn't ready for the same users that BeOS would be suitable for.
Windows has seen XP and Vista in that time. Solid releases, but not outstanding, and I'd happily use Windows 2000 today.
The big area lacking is multi-user support. That will be a deal breaker for many, and won't happen till R2. Otherwise there's a fabulous new OS around the corner, so what are you moaning about!?
Chris
Edited 2008-01-05 00:15
Member since:2005-12-31
I'm hoping that they'll get to Alpha this year too.
I was hoping before the summer months but don't think it'll happen. Before Summer because I'm guessing they'll get GSoC students again this year and it'd be nice if they could help Haiku work towards Beta.
Unfortunately, everyone wants to do their own thing. You have people working on WebKit, Java, OSS, etc. instead of combining to focus on getting to Alpha. Meaning, creating an installer, fixing up some odds & ends and squishing the major bugs out there will get done at a slower pace. At Alpha may show up at the end of this year or sometime next year.
You just can't force people / programers who dedicate their spare time. They decide what they want to work on and do. Even if this will cause the OS to take longer to complete. That's life.
Member since:2006-06-12
Hmmm.... a bounty would be nice. A bounty paying someone to create an installer that installs Haiku (from the CD) onto a blank partition (anyone can g-parted an create a blank partition, so no need to create a partitioning tool) and installs Grub if the user wishes.
Maybe what would be best is creating an installer that formats a partition, grabs the nightly build and dumps it on the newly created partition, then install Grub if the user wishes...hmmm....
wishful thinking.... i wish i could code. 
Member since:2005-08-26
This is the kind of post I love to read.
How do you eat an elephant?
One spoonful at a time.
Likewise with Haiku, by tackling huge efforts like this, we inevitably have to finish, revise, improve, and complete parts of the OS that have been or are missing, defunct, incomplete, etc.
It's very likely that the things that keep us from being self-hosting are the very things we'll need to overcome to port OpenJDK.
OpenJDK will inevitably attract new developers to the project. This means more people who are capable of fixing, fleshing out, and finishing things within Haiku itself -- even if it is for their own curious or selfish desires.
In the end, we all benefit.
Projects like WebKit and OpenJDK aren't just narrow-minded, one-trick ponies. They breed a larger community as well as improve the quality and quantity of code in Haiku.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-05-26
An OS developed without concern for the applications ends up just being a big useless bucket of bits. An OS is the foundation for an application ecosystem, and like the natural world, it is beneficial to evolve things in parallel and adapt things as you go along, because what you first think will work often doesn't work as well as you thought it'd work.
Developing new applications alongside the OS at the same time gives more of a testing frameworks for the OS and also helps the application developers learn the platform's ins and outs. There are non BeOS 5.03 features that have been implemented (the Java port in the past comes to mind) that were added to the system precisely because they were needed, and BeOS 5.03 simply couldn't support them, and thus these features that were foreign to BeOS 5.03 are now native to Haiku, and greatly improve the system's value. If you look in the bug database for Haiku, you'll find a large number of filed bugs referencing other applications in development, even if they're only in mostly maintenance mode.
Not all application developers are capable of what's required to develop the OS itself for various reasons, but they have the time/energy/ability to work on the separate applications. Thus, they aren't taking away from the OS development as much as they're adding trees to the forest of the OS and the other applications to make it a much better habitat for all.
"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues."
"Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently.
"In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies.
"The wave of departures is a sign of internal struggle, but amidst all the bad news, there is a glimmer of hope. According to an anonymous HTC executive cited by WSJ, the crucial HTC One is selling 'pretty good so far'. The executive revealed that HTC sold about five million One units since launch, a performance that is deemed encouraging. However, sales have been limited by the persisting supply issues that still plague the production of the HTC One." Finally some good news for HTC. Five million units amidst supply constraints is very impressive.
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. Weâll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that itâs usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing."The Verge has learned that HTC's Chief Product Officer, Kouji Kodera, left the company last week. Kodera was responsible for HTC's overall product strategy, which makes the departure especially notable on the heels of the global launch of the make-or-break One. It's not just Kodera. In the past three-odd months, HTC has lost a number of employees in rapid succession." I really hope HTC pulls it together.
"It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian 'sid' at the time of the Debian 'wheezy' release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release." Important note: 75% of Debian packages are supported bu Debian GNU/Hurd. Impressive.
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run."There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Member since:
2006-12-30
Sod bloody Java, sod bloody WebKit - finish the OS already! Or at least give us an ISO thats bootable and an installer on.
I'm a long time BeOS lover - I thought it was brilliant for its time, and am really REALLY keen on Haiku. I just think they are focusing their efforts in the wrong places.
pac