Mark J. Wielaard

Weiqi Gao has a nice piece about innovative usage of the GNU Classpath stack. Weiqi notes projects adopting GNU Classpath and free runtimes/compilers like gcj and ikvm get the freedom to move to new kinds of platforms and get new distribution opportunities:

Take a look at the free tools. You may have already won a free ticket to those places (natively compiled executables, .NET environment, bundled with a [GNU/]Linux distributions and end up on millions of computers)! if your code compiles and runs with a free compiler and runtime.

GNU Classpath-Jikes-JamVM on a Nokia 770

More fun experiments to get everything working on small devices. Cool stuff with ready to run arm .deb packages. (Now if I only had such a device… sniff.)

A new gnu.org list server is in the works. It will be a great update but till it is installed email to some of the classpath mailinglists can take hours to arrive… So we finally decided to move the the lists temporarily to another server. We have several hunderds of subscribers so I hope the move isn’t too disruptive. Please do contact me directly if you have any trouble after the move (scheduled at the end of this day).

Of course at the same day spamcop blacklists lists.gnu.org and we are getting lots of bounce messages from people using this RBL. And getting unsubscribed by mailman after too many bounces. Bleah. Email is such a broken concept these days. Sigh… All people unsubscribed this way will be resubscribed after the move automatically, but please do check one of the mailinglist archives (see the end of that page for other archives) to see whether you missed any emails.

It’s java-gnome week!

Fun for the whole family! Guess this means next week I need to finally update Snark Gnome. (ben and andrew actually did all the work for that already months ago, I am just lazy…)

We did it again! :)

New StAX pull parser and SAX-over-StAX driver. Full XMLEncoder implementation. The packages javax.sound.sampled, javax.print.attribute and javax.print.event have been implemented. Lots of new datatransfer, print, swing and swing.text work. Performance improvements in the painting/layout mechanism. Additional 1.5 support, including (separate) generic branch release. SecurityManager cleanups and start of review of all Permission checks. Buildable on cygwin. Fully buildable as “in-workspace” library-plus-vm inside (native) Eclipse. Real world Free Swing and CORBA example added.

Happy hacking!

builder.classpath.org is getting more goodness. We now have daily builds available (if make distcheck succeeds). So for those of you who want to help test the next (0.20) snapshot release please check the -pre dist tar ball. The autobuilder runs a couple of times a day so it should be fairly fresh. It might also be nice for those people who don’t have easy access to CVS on savannah.

Interesting experiment: micro-libgcj.

micro-libgcj is a lightweight version of the GCJ project’s runtime library (libgcj), intended to provide a usable subset of Java’s features while remaining small and self-contained. Whereas libgcj is intended to be a complete J2SE implementation based on GNU Classpath, micro-libgcj provides only enough functionality to support core Java language semantics.

We started this project with the goal producing small, self-contained executables from a mix of Java and C++, targeting four platforms: Win32 (i386), Mac OS X (PPC), and Linux (i386 and amd64). GCC is an ideal tool for this purpose, since it is widely ported, and its Java and C++ compilers produce ABI-compatible object code.

We consider micro-libgcj to be reliably usable on all four supported platforms, but it has not had enough exposure to be considered stable. We hope to make a stable release once the current beta distribution has seen use in non-trivial applications.

Should be fun to experiment with. See also the gcj mailinglist thread.

GNU Classpath and friends meeting during Fosdem 2006

The official GNU Classpath and friends meeting program is available. Looks like it will be a great event. February 25 and 26 in Brussles, Belgium. And as always there are also a lot of other cool talks to attend during Fosdem 2006.

eclipse-cdt entered Debian unstable. Making the ClasspathHackingWithEclipse setup work nicely out of the box on Debian. yeah! (wiki updated)

JNode 0.2.2 was released today. The JNode developers are often quiet (not many posts on the mailinglist, no blogs) but they seem to work very hard.

2006! Moving

The ADSL, telephone and cable companies are not playing nice which means I have had no internet access in my new house last week and probably won’t have any next week. It took a couple of days to get used to. And I cannot say that I particularly like it. But I must say that not having instant access to email, news, websites and updates is also very relaxing. It feels like I am on vacation :)

I have finally moved Planet Classpath from my personal box to our new shared developer.classpath.org machine. As soon as DNS updates the planet should automagically be available from its new location. Apologies if there is any interruption in your daily reading habits.

Happy new year!