Mark J. Wielaard

For my LinuxTag talk I wrote a little paper giving an overview of the GNU Classpath ecosystem. I hope it will give a nice overview of the why, how and what we have done. The talk (and the paper) main focus is on what you can do right now on modern GNU/Linux distributions. But if you come to the talk I will be happy to go into details or describe the challenges that are ahead of us. Right after my talk Christian will give a talk on CACAO explaining why it is so blazingly fast!

Red Hat Magazine has two nice articles on GNU Classpath, gcj and Eclipse in the new Fedora by Igor and Tom:

• Introduction to Eclipse on Fedora by Igor Foox
• Confessions of an Eclipse convert by Tom Tromey

And the general Inside Fedora Core 5 article has some notes on Azeureus support.

Bringing free software to the masses

zdnet uk has a nice interview with Peter Brown the executive director of the Free Software Foundation. It is good to see some more FSF people get some exposure in the press lately. It is facinating how different in personality people like Richard, Eben and Peter are. And how they have a completely different style when interacting with people. But they share the passion for providing (software) freedom to users.

GCJ support in JPP 1.7 Proposal

Thomas Fitzsimmons has a nice proposal to add
GCJ support to JPackage spec files. That sounds really nice. Good packaging and version support seems to be the next barrier. We know we have pretty good free software implementations of the core libraries, compilers and tools. Now we need to build better integration of all the packages we support for the various GNU/Linux distributions. And if we can reuse the work of the JPackage group that would be great.

jrvm, jdwp and free swing/awt support

Ian Rogers has been very active. He got the GNU Classpath Free Swing and AWT working with jrvm. And he has been playing with the GNU Classpath JDWP implementation. At the end of the thread Keith explains what works and what needs work (at least for gij). Cool stuff.

That is one interesting acquisition. I hope that means someone will cleanup the code that makes JBoss work with GNU Classpath/jamvm/cacao and makes sure it is also finally tested against gcj :)

LinuxTag

I will give a talk at LinuxTag (Wiesbaden, Germany, 3-6 May) this year about GNU Classpath. The talk will be a bit more high-level then what we did during Fosdem. I will mainly talk about the things people can do right now with what is included with their current GNU/Linux distributions. Since I will be there from Thursday till Saturday it would be fun to meet some people there. We can have a little hack-session, or just get together for some drinks and talk. Please let me know if you will be there. My talk is on Thursday May 4th at 16:00: GNU Classpath – The Free and Innovative alternative to the java programming language.

Mozilla completely relicensed

Congratulations to the Mozilla team. The long relicensing process is finally complete. All the code in the Mozilla source code repository which makes up Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey and Camino is now available under your choice of the MPL, LGPL or GPL! And another barrier falls. I cannot wait till GPLv3 is released and we will see even more possibilities for cooperation in the Free Software world.

With the help of Petter Reinholdtsen (yes, one of the original Japhar hackers), we finally got WW2D working with GNU Classpath and Cacao. This is pretty exciting since it is a nice showcase for our jawt and jogl support. One nice thing is that for zooming in and out you can now use the scroll wheel. As soon as I had implemented that Audrius and Roman thought up nice ways to add this also to our Free Swing components. WW2D isn’t fully functional yet since keyboard navigation support is currently missing (no KeyEvents on the custom Canvas), but if you have a wheel mouse you really should try this out. There are a couple of locations on earth that have a pretty scary resolution.

Enschede, my home town, isn’t one of those locations at this moment. But I am not sure I am very sad about it. It seems we have to get used to the fact that people will be able to watch everything from everywhere in the near future.

GNU Classpath 0.90 got imported into libgcj providing some nice new features. Still some small issues to cleanup, but most of the worked was just merging, compiling and testing things.

Some picures from GNU Classpath & Friends at Fosdem, and the meeting in A La Mort Subite are online. The pictures clearly show everybody had a very good time :)

Roman finished the last Ocean theme support in GNU Classpath cvs and has switched the default for Metal to it.

It certainly looks cool. But I think all the gradients on the components are a bit distracting compared with the old theme.

GNU Classpath 0.90 “A La Mort Subite” released

At our GNU Classpath and Friends meeting during Fosdem a lot of cool demos were given that showed what is possible with GNU Classpath now. So we decided to push out a new release so everybody can play with all the new stuff (0.90 works out of the box with jamvm 1.4.2 or cacao 0.95). Some highlights:

JTables can be rearranged and resized. Free Swing text components support highlighting and clipboard. Much improved styled text. Fast event dispatching and lower memory consumption. Better support for mixing lightweight and heavyweight components in AWT containers. GNU Crypto and Jessie cryptographic algorithms have been added providing ssl3/tls1 and https support. Unicode 4.0.0 support. GIOP and RMI stub and tie source code tools. XML validaton support for RELAX NG and W3C XML schemas. New file backend for util.prefs. Updated gnu.regexp from POSIX to util.regex syntax.

But the most exciting thing must be that MegaMek started working. That will surely boost the productivity of our GNU Classpath hackers :)