• Essien Ita Essien on GNU GOATS on JAVA
  

  Business as we know it is changing fast, and innovations like this are the reason. Like I said earlier, these are exciting times.

• OSNews on Fedora, Java And GCJ
  

  Along with the large number of free and open source Java packages made available in Fedora Core 4 already, more are being added to rawhide compiled with GCJ. These include Lucene, additional Jakarta components, and more. You can read the rawhide reports in Fedora Test to track the rolling development updates.

• Lambda the Ultimate on understanding Generics
  

  Are these problems a selling point for better type systems, or another barrier to adoption?

Last week I tried to help Michael with the Debian native Eclipse package and this week I played a bit with the Fedora JOnAS package. It thought me to respect the work of the packagers a lot more. Gary explained how to get a package dependency graph. So I tried to make one for Eclipse and Jonas. But there are just too many dependencies to create anything that is actually helpful.

ant-*, axis, bcel, classpathx-mail, eclipse-ecj, eclipse-rcp, gcc-java, gjdoc, gnu-crypto, jakarta-commons-*, java-1.4.2-gcj-compat, jessie, jsch, ldapjdk, libgcj, log4j, mx4j, tomcat5-*, wsdl4j, xml-commons-resolver

	avalon-framework, avalon-logkit, axis, bcel, carol, castor, classpathx-mail, eclipse-ecj, gjdoc, gnu-crypto, hsqldb, jakarta-commons-*, java-1.4.2-gcj-compat, jdom, jessie, jgroups, jonathan-core, jonathan-jeremie, joram, ldapjdk, libgcj, log4j, mx4j, objectweb-anttask, p6spy, struts, tomcat5-*, velocity, werken.xpath, wsdl4j, xdoclet, xjavadoc, xml-commons-resolver

And I only listed the most important dependencies of these programs. The amount of packages that are now freely available build upon GCJ4 is amazing. And it is fun that you can now also play with things like tomcat or axis out of the box. But how any packager is going to stay sane is beyond me :)

It shows how important projects like Gump are.

Sven was kind enough to do a little braindump of his thoughts on GNU Classpath Graphics2D Images and Text support.

Gary did it! (with a little help from jpackage)

It doesn’t look precisely like the example picture yet, but it is getting there.

If you are at LinuxTag, have your laptop with you, and want to see cool GNU Classpath demos please contact Robert

Unfortunately my notebook’s harddrive is faulty making it impossible for me to show running application’s :( (I am running Knoppix now) My plan was to show a plain Eclipse from eclipse.org which is compiled to native (using a recent GCJ snapshot) and maybe JamVM’s stunning interpreter performance using my little fosdemo (the one I had written for FOSDEM 2005). If someone wants to fix this situation and has a notebook to prepare the programs then please meet me at LinuxTag (Th/Fr/Sa, 10-18 o’clock).

I can confirm that his little fosdemo is pretty cool.

Spring, Jetty, and Velocity using GCJ on single board computers

We have integrated Spring, Jetty, and Velocity all on a SBC running embedded Linux. We compiled the Spring et al. under gcj 3.3 to native xscale object code. It works beautifully - it’s fast and reliable, with all of the Spring functionality intact.

Funky!

GNU Classpath/gcj presentations at LinuxTag

If you are near or in Germany please don’t forget to go to LinuxTag this
week (22 - 25 June, Karlsruhe).

On Saturday 25 June there will be 2 presentations on GNU Classpath/GCJ:

Robert Schuster - GNU Classpath (in German)

Andrew Haley - GCJ and Classpath: A Free Implementation of the java programming language (in English)

See also the full program on Saturday

Interesting statistics on book sales.
Especially in the light of the latest fedora rawhide updates showing lots of free packages going in now based on gcj. Debian/Ubuntu and the rest of the distributions will have to catch up quick. Although I hope the distributions will try to coordinate a bit on naming, versioning, etc. Fedora currently seems to try to cram out as much packages as possible. I actually like the way Debian only tries to push packages that are sane and ready. That doesn’t always give the quickest results of course. Fedora rawhide makes me feel like a little kid in a free-for-all candy store. Hope I won’t overeat!

Finally put up the pictures of Guadec 6 and Fisl 6.0.
 

David Wheeler also posted a nice Travelogue of his trip to Brazil, Fisl, lots of photos and some comments about our presentations.

And I stayed until 10pm, because several presentations were about Java implementations. People such as Bruno Souza (president of SouJava, a Brazilian Java user group that is a member of the Java Community Process), Dalibor Topić (lead maintainer of Kaffe), Mark Wielaard (lead for GNU Classpath, the leading OSS/FS Java core library implementation), and Geir Magnusson (lead for Apache Harmony) gave presentations. Information about OSS/FS Java implementations is really hard to get – particularly how all the pieces work together – and the FISL conference had many of the main leaders, so I really wanted to get the big picture. As you’ll see, I eventually got that insight, but it took some effort…

Robert asks:

What is this gcj-jit about? It sounds like an interface to the ahead of time compiler - something like a pseudo jit?

Ranjit replies:

See:
Using gcj as a JIT Compiler
For entertainment purposes only: gcj-JIT

Andrew’s comments are priceless:

You may find this interesting. On the other hand, you may find it totally horrible!
This isn’t yet ready for Prime Time, but IMO it’s a pretty impressive demonstration of the BC ABI.

Awesome!

Fedora Core 4 released!

One of the comments to the The Amazing Fedora Core 4! announcement was:

Sweet. OO.o 2.0 and Eclipse in an all-Free-Software distribution. Happy, happy, joy joy!

So go and try it out!
(Or help test the Debian eclipse packages.)

NewsForge published The GNU Compiler for Java comes of age.

Tromey says, “I often think about our endgame. What will it mean when GNU Classpath is complete? How can we be better than the proprietary JVMs but still be compatible?”

And for our German loving readers there is GNU Classpath - Was gibt es Neues? by our own Robert Schuster. It has a nice section on “wo wir glänzen”.

Finally back in The Netherlands, adjusting to the cold Dutch summer after the warm Brazilian winter. Dalibor and I drew up at least 20 World Domination plans. But after seeing the enthousiasm in Germany and especially Brazil I am convinced we have already won. Just imagine standing in a huge room with hunderds of people around you shouting “Software Livre! Software Livre! Software Livre!”. South America is comming and the rest of the world better starts running now if they want to stay relevant.

At Guadec there were a lot of people interested in the progress we have made in the last year. A couple of people showed and told me about the projects that they were working on. But people seemed a bit shy to admit that they have already adopted GCJ and GNU Classpath for development. Gnome seems to be a bit of a hostile environment for introducing higher level languages and concepts (except for Python!). But I hope we will see some of these projects publicly announced soon. The difference with Fisl was enormous. At Fisl people were really pushing for adoption on all levels, from individual hackers, large user groups, companies to the government. There were a lot of really happy faces when we showed the working demos of GNU Classpath, Kaffe, GCJ 4, java-gnome and native Eclipse. And there was a lot of talk about pushing out more documentation, courses and books about what has been achieved so far.

I cannot thank the SouJava people enough for inviting us to Fisl 6.0. The experience was unforgettable. Thank you!

See our shared presentation on GNU Classpath & Kaffe. There are some extra slides at the end that we didn’t use during this presentation but that we did show either during our individual talks or when we were talking to people one-on-one.

I think I know why they call Europe the old continent. In Brazil they know how to party till 04:00 AM and still have a full program around all things Free Software from 09:00 till 20:00. Amazing amount of energy here. These people grok Free Software!

Dalibor and I are working together nicely. We seem to get the message across that diversity can go together with harmony, how we are making amazing progress, and how the TCK and JCP process are not helping us getting better and more compatible fast. Several big companies and government officials seemed to get that message.

Anthony Green gave me a nice hint for the demo. Install a local CVS repository to show the eclipse team diff handling. That was really nice to show. There was indeed no network available in the room that we presented (all the other rooms do have network). Thanks Anthony.

BTW. It is true! Dalibor has a large number of groupies here. And random girls walk up to him to get their picture taken with him.