Dalibor arrived in Stuttgart (08:00 good morning).

Lots of excitement after the Eclipse talk yesterday. People were really interested in the various plugins. The fact that Andrew had a powerbook with a native ppc version of Eclipse made some people really happy. The bugzilla plugin attracted interest. And people were even saying they would drop emacs for native eclipse (I think the talk went a bit too well…)

Today was the talk of Ben and Andrew Cowie Eclipse, Java-GNOME, Glade and GCJ. They made a nice combination. Andrew is pretty down to business. Giving the message “this combination is the only one that makes sense really”. Ben is the demo guru. The java-gnome Eclipse plugin and the quick and dirty slide show presentation application written using that plugin using gcj, java-gnome and glade (he actually used this application to show his slides!) was awesome. Again lots of interest after the talk.

The fact that people keep claiming that “suddenly” GCC 4.0 (gcj) appeared and made it all work is a bit annoying. We have been working on all this stuff for years. But apparently only just now people are seeing that all this actually works and fits perfectly together.

Guadec is interesting because the Gnome community is pretty big and they do work on lots of issues. You have application developers, gtk+ library hackers and kernel hackers doing interesting interaction. What was kind of missing though were the gcc, glibc, GNU autotools and friends. I think there could be some pretty interesting interaction with these groups. Gnome is now so big that they really should tackle the whole platform more constructively. Lots of talk is either detailed on specific applications, libraries or new cool kernel stuff or really high level stuff about “the next big thing” (collaboration?) or defining “what Gnome is” (not a distribution?). It isn’t really clear to me how or what Gnome as a whole should concentrate on now next. Maybe the Gnome community is so big now that they should actually break up into smaller communities that do some smaller parts really well. It will be interesting watching how Gnome goes forward. I am looking forward to better integrate our core libraries with the Gnome desktop.

Next up 6th International Free Software Forum (fisl).

Andrew and Ben gave a great performance. The The Eclipse IDE and you talk was really inspiring. People were clearly excited to check it out. Lots of specific suggestions for improvements to make it a really great Free Software hacking tool. Looking forward to Ben and Andrew Cowie their talk about java-gnome tomorrow (also using eclipse and gcj).

Guadec: 29 - 31 May, Stuttgart - Germany

• The Eclipse IDE and you
  Ben Konrath and Andrew Overholt
• Eclipse, Java-GNOME, and GCJ
  Andrew Cowie and Ben Konrath

6th International Free Software Forum (fisl): June 1 - 4, Porto Alegre/RS, Brazil

• Encontro Javali: Escape the Java Trap: Classpath and Kaffe, Implementing the Java Standards GNU Style
  Dalibor Topic and Mark Wielaard

LinuxTag: 22 - 25 June, Karlsruhe - Germany

• GNU Classpath
  Robert Schuster (in German)
• GCJ and Classpath: A Free Implementation of the Java programming language
  Andrew Haley (in English)

OSCON: 1 - 5 August, Portland, Oregon - USA

• The State of Free JVMs
  Tom Tromey

Where is the Harmony?

Things like the bad competition between KDE and GNOME is what keeps me interested in the harmony project. There is also good competition between these projects. And I do hope Harmony can be what freedesktop.org is for the larger free software desktop community. That is what we have always tried to do with GNU Classpath.

And it seems that is kind of happening now. We have even seen Apache hackers contributing patches to Kaffe (showing that the licensing issue can be overcome!). And there is a lot of talk on the list on the cutting edge research that is being done against all the free runtimes (Robert surprized me by posting about an university course on hacking JamVM).

And even gadek and I seem to agree for a change. He points out Snap which tries to show that what Harmony set out to be is already possible. Creating a collection of free libraries, runtimes, compilers, tools and applications to show what the community around GNU Classpath has produced these last few years. Hopefully people wanting to make Harmony a success check out these kind of collections and try out Kaffe OpenVM or GCC 4.0 to see how we can have harmony asap! (BTW. The Live-CD idea is really nice. I wish there was one for FC4test3 to show all the native stuff created with GCJ for those that don’t want to install a full FC4 test release.)

Thanks for the great gift Julian! GNU gjdoc 0.7.5. Updated GNU Classpath (CVS) docs at http://developer.classpath.org/doc/

Free AWT hackers observe and learn: Eclipse on SWT/GTK+ Performance Notes

Hurd-Gnome! Keep on rocking. Keep on hacking. Wow.

Roman checked in Kim Ho’s implementation of JFileChooser. And our Free Swing implementation is actually looking better and better each day. Quick screenshot of the new JFileChooser and jedit (main window, file system browser and search/replace dialog) in action (jamvm 1.3.0 + GNU Classpath CVS + cairo 0.3.0):

Sweet. (But no, jedit isn’t actually usable yet out of the box.)

Found on the harmony mailinglist:

> we recommend they start to contribute by submitting Classpath patches (which we could kindly call “Classpatches” :-)
Well, since Apache was “a patchy server” this would not be quite out of league :)

The Auto-vectorization with gcj looks exciting. If this can be made to work for java source files (and it looks like it is almost there already) then we will see some very nice speedups. Auto-vectorization in GCC has some examples in C and Fortran that GCC supports now. There is also the GCC Autovectorization Enhancements wiki.

Impressed by the fact that wikipedia runs on gcj for Lucene indexing. As Anthony pointed out on the Harmony list this is a showcase for Apache and GNU technology working together in an important real-world application. Also nice to see that traditional tools like gprof and oprofile can and are used to analyze performance. Seems we need to look at our regex implementation to give them a little speed boost.

Also on the horizon the next Debian (sarge) release! The Call for upgrade testing was just announced.

BTW. It seems some spam filters need to be adjusted to the new German spam. Currently fighting my way through mailman approval for some legitimate messages from new people on the GNU Classpath mailinglist. Please be patient, your message will arrive eventually.

Finally some nice press about our OpenOffice/GCJ community work. GCJ is now also mentioned on the OpenOffice.org homepage. Please help out if you can.

Taking a little time off-line. I’ll be back answering email after the weekend.

Just got a thank you email from Richard Stallman about our progress with OpenOffice 2.0 and GCJ 4 for both communities. The FSF has also updated the text at http://www.fsf.org/news/open-office-java.html to better reflect our current status:

Volunteers needed to build, test and package free OpenOffice 2.0

The FSF is looking for volunteers to build, test and packagefully free versions of OpenOffice 2.0 that use GCJ as a replacement for the non-free Java platform. OpenOffice and GCJ hackers have worked hard to make sure that all the new features of the next version of OpenOffice 2.0 written in the java programming language will build and run with GCJ, the GNU Compiler for java part of GCC 4.0. This support was just very recently added to GCJ and OpenOffice and does not yet work completely out of the box. OpenOffice 2.0 is not finished yet, but beta versions are available. We want to make sure that when OpenOffice 2.0 final is released everything builds and runs out of the box with GCC 4.0 for all Free Software users.

Please write to java@gcc.gnu.org for a list of bugs, patches and feature requests needed for better support and instructions for testing and reporting bugs to the GCJ and OpenOffice teams.

Thanks to all involved! Lets work together from here to make both OpenOffice 2.0 and GCJ 4 rock. If you haven’t tried out these new programs together please try and help us improve them.

How to take the fun out of someones achievement

Uraeus post made me sad. It was an hectic week, but is seems our Harmony effort is already a success. planet.classpath.org saw a record number of visitors, the irc channel has been full of interested people and after some discussions back and forth it seems that everybody agrees that whatever happens next it will be a good thing for the whole community. I would love to meet my new harmony friends at ApacheCon Europe next month or meet some of the current GNU Classpath hackers at LinuxTag (during which cbj announced that I would be the new maintainer two years ago). But I decided instead to go to Guadec. I saved my last money to pay for the trip, stay and entrance fee (!). Just because I wanted to see all the cool presentations about Gnome using gcj, GNU Classpath, Eclipse and java-gnome. And to learn how to better integrate our AWT, Swing and Graphics libraries with gtk+, cairo, pango and the rest of the Gnome platform. But it seems that it is time to stop kidding ourselves that we will enhance the Gnome desktop with our efforts. Sigh.

Posted some thoughts on how GNU Classpath hackers can help Harmony.

Sven then did a little dance!

These guys are cool, and by cool I mean totally sweet.

Yes, that announcement wasn’t really coordinated.
But I tried to make my views clear on the mailinglist.
Please read and enjoy. I just don’t have much time this weekend, but I do hope this will work out great.

Update: Posted about Harmony! to the GNU Classpath mailinglist. With links to:

• The State of World by Tom Tromey.
• GNU Classpath family overview by Dalibor Topic.
• Important documents for cooperating on getting towards a full free j2se implementation based on what the projects around GNU Classpath have been doing

The latest numbers from David Gilbert about GNU Classpath and Mauve progress are in (yes, I am behind on email):

Also forgot to mention that GNU Classpath 0.15 was released last week.

Optimized nio and nio.charset plus io streams integration leading to large speedups in character stream performance. To complement this new framework a native iconv based charset provider was added. Better support for free swing metal and pluggable lafs. Some org.omg.CORBA support added. Better java.beans support for the Eclipse Visual Editor Project. Completely lock free ThreadLocal implementation added. More javax.swing.text support for RTF and HTML. More flexible runtime interfaces and build configuration options.

26 people actively contributed code to 0.15 and made 299 CVS commits during the last two months of development (that is 5 commits each and every day). diffstat since 0.14: 993 files changed, 74259 insertions(+), 15666 deletions(-). Sloccount now gives us 344,505 lines of code. That is up 16,774 lines (or 279 lines per day) of pure source code since 0.14. We now PASS 27,325 of 27,959 Mauve tests (up from 25,442 out of 25,912 with 0.14).

Happy news for those following the OpenOffice.org 2.0 melodrama. Caolan made the new document Writer wizards working under gcj. He also has a list of bugs, patches and feature requests needed for better support.

We might soon need a bigger planet! Thomas Fitzsimmons now has a blog that is aggregated on planet.classpath.org. Welcome Tom! And Mark Howard got a fresh new blog. He had an old blog on the planet earlier, but I somehow missed his movement announcement. Sorry Mark.

If you are reading this on the planet please scroll down a bit to catch their older posts.