“The GNU Classpath team would like to announce the release of version 0.91 of their Free class library for the Java programming language. In the last 10 weeks the project implemented the Java Printing API based on CUPS, finished an ‘Ocean’ theme similar to the one available in version 5.0 of Sun’s Java2 Standard Edition runtime, implemented the APIs for UI accessibility features, and updated many parts of the class library
documentation. The latter was done by David Gilbert of JFreeChart, who takes part in the GNU project and gave a
demostration (.odp|.pdf) at FOSDEM 2006 showing that JFreeChart is able to run on 100% Free
software (Cairo + JamVM + GNU Classpath).”
Now that Sun has announced that they are going to open source Java, I wonder what will happen to projects like GNU Classpath.
If Sun actually releases their code under an open source license, then merging Sun’s efforts with those of the free software community would be an interesting option.
The door has always been kept open for Sun to participate in the development of an open source Java implementation, and I’d be glad to see them collaborate with the other efforts.
cheers,
dalibor topic
The door has always been kept open for Sun to participate in the development of an open source Java implementation, and I’d be glad to see them collaborate with the other efforts.
Sun is not going to come through “the door” and will be participating in their own open source project…not Classpath.
Now that Sun has announced that they are going to open source Java, I wonder what will happen to projects like GNU Classpath.
If Sun releases Java under the same license as Solaris, then the GPL won’t be compatible with it. Classpath isn’t really relevant anyway.
What’s the “best” OSS virtual machine to use with Classpath? I used to use Kaffe, but I hear from others that its competitors have surpassed it.
Kaffe is most probably still your best bet if you look for a mostly complete JDK replacement. It has an efficient Just-In-Time compiler (in fact a few of them for different architectures) and should work just fine for most tasks.
A more lightweight solution would be JamVM, which doesn’t have a JIT, but nonetheless is very quick.
There are also other viable options: GCJ offers probably the best performance, but cannot use Classpath directly.
Two other JITting VMs are Jikes RVM and CacaoJVM. And last but not least there are SableVM and JCVM.
I think it’s best if you try and check which one suits you best. Each of them takes less than 10 minutes to build, so it’s quite feasible to try them all.
I wonder how this would be affected with the recent decision to open source Java by Sun.