In this exclusive interview, Rich Sharples, Product Management Director at Red Hat, talks about OpenJDK. the free and open source implementation of the Java SE platform. The IcedTea project, one of Red Hat's major contributions to the OpenJDK ecosystem, has done a great deal to enable upstream adoption of Java on the Linux platform; however, the question remains whether Java would've been more ubiquitous throughout the Linux universe had Sun open sourced Java much sooner than it actually did. Rich discusses some of these issues and talks about some of the new features in OpenJDK 7, as well as the impact that dynamic languages, increased modularity and virtualization will have on the Java platform. He also describes the impact he thinks Oracle's acquisition will have on licensing options around OpenJDK.
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Member since:2005-07-24
Not that either one is wildly popular. But I have to wonder how Microsoft .Net of all things managed to get the jump on Java for FOSS development under Linux. Miguel de Novella, I guess...
Member since:2008-07-15
Simple answer to that actually, it made development of native-seeming apps very simple, at least for GNOME. Bindings to all the major GNOME libraries were provided and are quite extensive, and their C# API is extremely straight forward. Java has the language, but nothing really native around it--very few bindings to native libraries, no native toolkits other than the overly complex swt (not even part of Java itself in any case). Java apps just don't integrate well with most of the native environments--they don't act quite the same, they look out of place, and a lot of functionality is not available to them. That's why Mono got the drop on Java, a very unfortunate thing imho. It seems rather typical of Sun (pre-Oracle at least)products in recent years... huge potential, thrown away by a string of bad decisions. Java on the desktop needs a massive improvement before most will seriously consider it for desktop apps, and unfortunately is confined for the most part to backends of enterprise applications. Great language, not so great libraries for the desktop.
Member since:
2007-07-25
I could not agree more. Java still could turn the negative trend around, but they have to act rather fast.