Red Hat just made it possible to bootstrap OpenJDK using only Free Software by building on top of gcj and replacing the binary blobs with code from GNU Classpath. The result is called IcedTea. IKVM also made a GNU Classpath/OpenJDK hybrid making it possible to run parts of the OpenJDK class libraries on mono and .net. And finally the Cacao team released a
new version of Cacao that can use either GNU Classpath for a full J2SE implementation or that uses the Sun GPL J2ME libraries, including jits for lots of different architectures (alpha, arm, mips, ppc, ppc64, x86 and x86_64).
I found the name quite funny :-).
I found the name quite funny :-).
Me too. It reminded me of the rapper turned T.V. actor Ice-T. I think that is his name.
I found the name quite funny :-).
Well, let’s face it, it’s going to be some creative combination of various beverages – anything apart from Java ;-).
well, although this seems like a good thing first, i think it would be better if they wait a little more until Open JDK project settles and contribute there. Open JDK also will be in mercurial repositories, and they were already asking people to cooporate for missing open source parts after all. i hope RedHat’s intention is not stealing the thunder of Sun by grabbing the %90 of Open JDK code and trying to seem the “actual” developers of it by plugging some classpath code into it. it is a fact hat still most of new JDK7 code is written by the Sun engineers.
If you read the link, they said that they were going to contribute it to OpenJDK, but they wanted to go ahead and get started instead of waiting for their repositories to be setup. They also said that the code is pretty experimental and wouldn’t be ready to check in to the official project anyway.
I think this is great. Can’t wait to see Java better integrated into GNU/Linux. Hopefully we’ll only have one apt-get install java in the future.
Does anyone know what the status is on Ubuntu Gutsy for this?
You mean instead of
% apt-get install sun-java6-jre
like right now?
Well I was more thinking that we don’t have to decide on which make of Java JRE to install, but just use the default one from Sun and that it is 100% free and open.
ok if I write some java code (write once, deploy many, as they used to say) will I find ‘compatibilty issues’ with these various implementaions?
IcedTea at this point is highly experimental (by definition), so I’d expect to see all sorts of issues.
The initial goal was to get OpenJDK to build without having to rely on binary encumbrances, using the free software code from Classpath to fill out the gaps.
Whether that turns out to be the best way forward (wrt to compatibility), we don’t know yet, but now that there is working code out there, we can begin to find out.
Edited 2007-06-08 12:56
Glad to see GNU Classpath is making its way to the main Open JDK tree. Keep up the good work Mark, Dalibor and Firends ! 🙂