Those who hope Sun will open-source all of its software products anytime soon are in for a big disappointment. Sun executives, including president Jonathan Schwartz and John Loiacono, the executive vice president for software, have all repeatedly said that the company intends to open-source its entire software stack over time. However, they have not been specific about the time frame for that, which has left the impression that it is imminent. But Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open-source officer, said in an interview that this process is not going to be rushed and will not happen quickly.
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Member since:Given that gcj is not a JVM, but an ahead-of-time compiler, and does not try to build a JVM, I'd expect any project building a JVM to produce a truly usable JVM faster than gcj. Heck, many have. See JamVM/Cacao/IKVM/SableVM/JikesRVM/* 
That doesn't mean that gcj ain't very useful: see fedora core's selection of packages that run and build on gcj. A lot of stuff works, and a lot more will, as the missing and broken bits of the class libraries get fleshed out. J2EE servers are now within reach, with JOnAS being the first J2EE server to be packaged for FC 5, afaict, and performing increasingly as correctly under gcj as it does under proprietary runtime implementations.
Now, with JOnAS, and possibly other J2EE servers humming along on gcj next year[1], a lot of things have to be in place, and working correctly. The dependency graph of something like JOnAS is very, very huge. Given that Java's strength in the marketplace is on the serverside, I'd hope that gcj can help make serverside Java programming more accessible to people, by making it easy to package the bytecode jar mess as plan old DSOs, and have it come with each distro out of the box, like, say, Ruby, PHP, Python and all those succeful other 'little man's frameworks'[2] do.
That, in Sun's JS's own worldview means bringing in more volume for the platform, so it is a fine thing for all of us peddling in Java, free or non-free.
Harmony will hopefully produce an interesting, usable VM in a few years, as well, but gcj is already increasingly usable today, and will serve us well until that Harmony VM of the future appears.
None of this has anyting to do with the things Simon said in that interview, anyway, so it seems like we're getting a bit sidetracked here.
cheers,
dalibor topic
[1] Resin's new, fast PHP on gcj ... now that would be interesting.
[2] That's how they are often seen from the Java side of the fence, apparently. See the current 'fear and loathing in Javaland' regarding Ruby & Rails. Last year it was PHP, and the year before that it was Python, and the year before that it was C#.
Member since:2005-12-18
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Well, I wouldn't say GCJ is coming up that fast. Right now, applications that will run under GCJ are the exception rather than the rule. "
hmm, see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JavaFAQ. Openoffice.org base, Eclipse, Jonas, Tomcat etc run on GCJ with Fedora Core 4 and the numbers keep increasing everyday. Just look at the Fedora development tree. GCJ is about 90% complete with Java 1.4 with a fast paced 1.5 branch. if that isnt open source Java what is?
GCJ is BOTH a compiler as well as JVM (gij) and Fedora Java development from redhat people can switch between being a compiler, gij JVM or Sun JVM dynamically as well as manually
Member since:2005-10-08
"GCJ is about 90% complete with Java 1.4 with a fast paced 1.5 branch. if that isnt open source Java what is?"
Because that 90% is misleading since it only includes the core Java API. Virtually nothing from javax.* has been completed for example. There is no Swing support, and so on.
Member since:
2005-10-08
"I just wished they'd get it over with and open source Java. Although, it's their own neck they are cutting. GCJ is coming up faaast."
Well, I wouldn't say GCJ is coming up that fast. Right now, applications that will run under GCJ are the exception rather than the rule. And it has been in development for quite some time. I have more faith that Harmony will produce a truly usable open source JVM than GCJ will.