Mark J. Wielaard

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.

Now that I am actually paying attention to all the Micro Edition stuff I notice that there actually are a lot of them already (based on GNU Classpath). Today I stumbled upon Jelatine JVM:

Jelatine is a new Java Virtual Machine which targets the Java 2 Micro Edition Connected Limited Device Configuration (J2ME CLDC). The machine was designed to work on very small embedded systems and requires as little as 32 KiB of RAM for running non-trivial Java code (provided that the executable is stored in ROM). It also provides an (almost) CLDC compliant classpath which has been obtained by modifying and reusing parts of the GNU/Classpath project.

Completely unrelated. It seems the only correct way to stop this glorified-chain-letter stuff is to keep the fate and link to Smoochieboochies :)

Funky stuff. Ruva: A simple stack-based virtual machine implementation written entirely in Ruby which uses GNU Classpath as core library implementation.

As always GNU Classpath and Friends will come to Fosdem (Brussels, Belgium, 24/25 February) to discuss “the state of the world”. Obviously one big event going on in 2007 will be the OpenJDK project and figuring out how to work together. Normally we call this meeting “Escape the Java Trap”, but with Sun’s recent announcement it is clear the trap is being smashed at a very high speed now and our focus should be much more on the future of collaboration. So we decided to combine the original meeting with the traditional GNU/Linux distro DevJam meeting and the OpenJDK people. Bringing you three sessions on GNU Classpath, OpenJDK and Packaging. Hopefully we will still all fit in the same room :)

Tom Marble from Sun/OpenJDK posted some reasons you should be there. So come and join us!

MIDPath provides a MIDP2 implementation on top of the SDL and SDLJava libraries. It targets free JVMs working with GNU Classpath: Cacao, Kaffe, JamVM. The code is based on phoneME, the free implementation of MIDP2 from Sun. MIDPath is released under the GPL.

Now you can play all those cool java phone games on your desktop using free sofware :)

Last week GNU Classpath 0.93 “Dreamland” was finally released. As always this is the best release ever! The screenshots look really nice. And you should really go through the very extensive release notes which discuss everything. Highlights of new features in this release, pointers to supported applications and screenshots, the status and future of the 1.4 and 1.5 generics branches. An update on the Summer of Code student work. Plus some prelimenary ideas on cooperating with the Sun GPL OpenJDK Java project. And the GNU Classpath commitments to the Free Software community for the future of various projects around GNU Classpath, the users and GNU/Linux distros relying on our work.

Go team!

FSF year-end fund-raiser

The FSF is doing a
year-end fund-raiser for their 2007 campaigns for software
freedom. Their target is 300 new FSF members. So, if you
aren’t a FSF member please consider becoming one now. And if
you do it through the following link I might actually get
RMS on
my answering machine! How cool is that? :) So don’t
wait, click now!

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Join the FSF today!