Mark J. Wielaard

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 :)

GCC 4.1 released

GCC 4.1 was finally released today. The gcj support is based on a slightly older GNU Classpath snapshot but it does include some really cool changes, new features, and fixes. You can read some more about it in an article I wrote a while ago on the GCJ part. “A look at GCJ 4.1“.

I am looking for similar overviews for the other parts of the GNU Compiler Collection. Dear lazyweb, please let me know if there are some high-level articles on the 4.1 changes in the general optimizer, c, c++, fortran, ada, objective-c[++] frontends, and new target support. There is so much going on around GCC that it is hard to keep up.

back

Back from Fosdem plus GNU Classpath and Friends meeting. It was a great event! Really tired now :) Some presentation slides on JFreeChart, Cairo, Free Swing and vmgen are now available.

The Fedora documentation team has been asking for Free FOP (Formatting Objects Processor – XSL-FO to PDF converter) and Thomas Fitzsimmons delivers. The result is still a bit boring since images are missing in the produced PDF file. But it can already be used to format 100+ page documents.

GNU Classpath and Friends – Get ready for Fosdem!

Super excited about Fosdem next weekend. There will be lots of cool talks and demos and it will be so nice to meet all the hackers. If you are coming please check out the practical info about the developer room. And if possible come to the Friday night meeting to have a beer together.

With all the excitement about Free Swing you would almost forget about our AWT implementation(s). Got some nice progress with our AWT gtk+ peers:

Lillian is also working on some AWT issues now. But there are still lots of hairy corner cases to get right. It is good to see some progress here since Michael is hacking on gcjwebplugin again and lots of applets still use AWT.

A look at GCJ 4.1

LWN published A look at GCJ 4.1 (and beyond). It seems there will be a GCC 4.1 RC1 release soon so everybody can try it out. (update: no rc1 yet, hopefully over the weekend.)

Although the article didn’t discuss any speed improvements (it is mainly about the progress of the standard core library) there are some comments to the article pointing out different benchmarks. There were also some interesting threads about performance on the gcj mailing list. Some reports claim native-complied GCJ modules are almost always about 30-40% faster than other implementations (at least on real world code). Others have micro-benchmarks that show that there are cases where gcj isn’t as fast at all. But in the end you have to be careful about what you benchmark, or GCJ will just optimize away all non-used code :)