Mark J. Wielaard

• Caolan McNamara – Backtraces and prelink
• Rob Bradford – OProfileUI Profiling made pretty

GNU Classpath wasn’t directly participating in Summer of Code. But since we are in the integration business between various projects and communities it still resulted in some interesting projects for us that I am excited to see happen.

There is the proposal from Mario Torre for Gnome/GStreamer Desktop sound integration for Java for the GNU project. Which is particular nice seeing that GStreamer didn’t get accepted as a project this year and that GNU Classpath has had pretty nice Gnome integration already (there was also a proposal for better KDE/Qt integration that sadly didn’t make it).

Then there is the proposal from Dalibor Topic for Integrating OpenJDK’s javac bytecode compiler into gcj for the GCC project. Which is hopefully the first step into combining some great GNU and OpenJDK technologies and making the migration path between the projects for our mutual users (the GNU/Linux distros) smoother.

Andrew Hughes will be integrating the java.lang.management JMX Implementation into JikesRVM and Eslam Almorshdy will be Adding JDWP and JVMTI support (exciting seeing that Keith and Kyle made considerable progress on making sure the GNU Classpath JDWP layer talks nicely to Eclipse). JikesRVM has some more interesting student projects this year.

Congrats to all students!

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released – happily upgrading some boxes now.

Jeremy Allison talks about Working for The Man 

 Proprietary environments are a trap

What will get very interesting in the future is the effect a fully open Java platform will have on the software environment in the next ten years. After initially ignoring Java due to its proprietary restrictions, I now believe Java and it’s associated libraries have the potential to be the next POSIX.

Andrew Haley posted a nice sneak preview:

Go! Go! Go! Team

Fedora 7 Test 3 got released and includes the new gcj with 1.5 support. Really nice to see all this goodness work out of the box now.

Dalibor pointed out a nice story about GNU Classpath and JamVM being used to run Tomcat on the N800, and it all just works. Very impressive.

Phil Muldoon setup Planet Frysk. Cool!

Simon Phipps and Mark Reinhold made a video: Java Opens Up.

It was recorded before the Fosdem GNU Classpath/OpenJDK DevJam (check out some of the slides posted there for some more in depth info), so you probably won’t learn much more if you have been in Brussels. But they do a very good job of describing the process of going GPL (“The Gold Standard”), what is already there, when what will be available and the help they are looking for from the community. And it is worth watching so you can hear Simon call GNU Classpath “A piece of rebel code” :) There is an Ogg/Theora version of the video.

P.S. If you want to publish Ogg/Theora videos but only have something in a less open or encumbered format, then check out ffmpeg2theora. Providing video in a fully free open format will get you more viewers, especially if your target audience is the free software community.

Still recovering from the big Fosdem weekend. It was great and exhausting. I was super nervous about it. I just didn’t know whether people would mingle and talk because the group was bigger and more diverse than ever. But it seems that people did. A big thanks to David Delabassee for helping select restaurants and pubs to go to after the conference talks. People seemed to enjoy that a lot. And I was happy to see that the Sun/OpenJDK people also got something out of it. Both Tom Marble and Mark Reinhold have written about some of their experiences and the feedback they got. Petteri Räty already published his Gentoo talk on the DevJam Wiki. If you have slides, please add a link to them on the wiki.

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!