Coming to the Fosdem libre java event this year? Then you will need this little brochure of all the fun things going on:

And don’t forget to check out the full Fosdem schedule. Lots of fun stuff to see and do!

Tom Marble started as OpenJDK Ambassador. Go Tom!

Really looking forward to meet him at Fosdem.

Christian Thalinger (aka twisti) just announced 10 years of CACAO and some very nice birthday presents:

From: Christian Thalinger <twisti <at> complang.tuwien.ac.at>
Subject: 10 years CACAO
Date: 2007-02-19 11:23:49 GMT

The CACAO virtual machine celebrates its 10th anniversary. On February
14th 1997 CACAO 0.1 using the class library of the JDK 1.0.2 for the
Alpha processor under Digital Unix was put online on the web. Now CACAO
supports Alpha, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, Sparc, x86 and x86-64 processor
under different operating systems. Major milestones were the new JIT
compiler in the year 1998, the move to GNU Classpath library in 2003 and
the release of most parts of CACAO under the GPL in 2004.

We don’t have a 10th-anniversary-release, but we can announce some other
news: our previously closed-source JIT compiler ports for the Arm and
MIPS (o32) architecture have been released also under the GPL.
Furthermore, it is now possible to use Sun’s phoneme CLDC-1.1 classes
with CACAO out-of-the-box.

Happy birthday to us! And lets see what the next 10 years will bring…

Your CACAO Team

Woot! Happy birthday Cacao! Looks like you gave a great opening punch for the GNU Classpath Runtime Rumble taking place next weekend at Fosdem!

Last year at LinuxTag I gave a presentation on GNU Classpath and what I thought was the next big challenge, packaging all those liberated programs written in java.

One could say that we have succeeded in providing working code for a far range of existing Free Software projects written in the java programming language. The real challenge now is no longer producing working code (although help is still very much appreciated!). The applications that really matter do work on the free stack and are now included in the latest GNU/Linux distributions. The real problem now is the packaging and versioning of all that code. We are used to having pretty decent versioning and dependency control on GNU/Linux systems. That is not so in the traditional java world. The next challenge is sanely integrating the free java world with the GNU/Linux world. And finding a solution for the dependency and version problem that came with the liberation of all this cool new code. We are extremely happy that the major problem today is finding ways to sanely integrate and build the large and diverse set of Free Software that the community produced. And we hope your next Free Software project will be based on GNU Classpath and this rich set of libraries and tools build on top of it so that it will be included in your favorite GNU/Linux distribution in the future.

Over the years we have unlocked so many cool programs and libraries that they started to overwhelm our packagers. Fedora is now organising a Reviewfest (which some Debian, Gentoo, JPackage packagers will be observing with interest) to prevent what happened 2 years ago when we had a full free J2EE stack based on JOnAS and GCJ which never got through the full review process. Which meant that you had to know the “secret” location for all the rpms and install them by hand instead of just running yum install jonas and let your package mechanism take care of all the interdependencies.

And with the upcoming full liberalization of OpenJDK we will most likely see a tsunami of new packages for the various GNU/Linux distributions (JPackage provides a nice package overview). Tom Marble is even threatening that Sun is considering re-licensing some more core libraries as free software. It will be interesting times. And I am really looking forward to the OpenJDK and Distro DevJam sessions during Fosdem in 2 week.

Started using Fedora for my development desktop system and CentOS on my server system. Pretty nice combination. That also gave me the opportunity to install WordPress 2.1. Interesting new features, like the visual editor and spell checking. Lets see how this post looks. Enabled comments and Bad Behavior. Hope it helps combat comment spam.

At Fosdem Fedora+CentOS will share a developer room, just like the GNU Classpath+OpenJDK DevJam projects share one.