Mark J. Wielaard

Raif Naffah created a nice Hacking GNU Classpath with Eclipse document (including lots of screenshots) explaining how to setup native Eclipse on Fedora Core 4 to directly hack on GNU Classpath and Mauve. Tom Tromey made it so that you can use Cacao as runtime for all your work from inside Eclipse. And Stephan Michels helped me replicate the whole setup out of the box on Debian (unstable).

The result is nice. Following the instructions automatically creates a whole GNU Classpath hacking and testing environment using Eclipse on a fully free stack out of the box on modern distributions. The fact that we are building and testing our own stuff using applications build on top of it is pretty powerful. And the instant write/compile/test cycle (the compile step just disappears) should make people more productive when writing, testing and fixing Mauve tests.

It is a wiki page, so please share any hints and tips if you try it out.

We are pleased to announce gjdoc release 0.7.7. gjdoc is the GNU documentation generation framework for java source files. gjdoc is part of GNU Classpath Tools. This is mostly a bug-fix release. This makes gjdoc much more robust when dealing with invalid documentation tags or source code and it is now possible to generate the whole javadocs for eclipse using gjdoc out of the box.

New in release 0.7.7

• gjdoc/24457: NPE for @see tag
• gjdoc/24474: StackOverflowError in reflexive expressions
• gjdoc/24501: gjdoc doesn’t compile
• gjdoc/24508: Files weren’t generated for packages with names like *.java
• gjdoc/24509: gjdoc is not able to use the javadocs from java.sun.com
• gjdoc/24510: gjdoc have problems the -linkoffline
• gjdoc/24507: The overview-summary.html are not generated
• gjdoc/24553: Problem with @link tags in parameter descriptions
• gjdoc/24722: Problems with single line comments between method arguments

Thanks to Stephan Michels, David Gilbert, Julian Scheid and Michael Koch for reporting bugs, suggesting and testing fixes and preparing the
release. The latest release of GNU gjdoc can always be found at ftp.gnu.org/gnu/classpath. This new version of gjdoc has been used to generate class documentation for the GNU Classpath CVS source files.

The “official autobuilder and regression tester” builder.classpath.org is finally fully operational.

The builder.classpath.org Xen infrastructure has been donated by Berkeley Signal Inc through Jim Pick who also helps with setup and maintenance of the system. We are currently using Tom Tromey’s build scripts for updating, compiling and running the following things:

• gcc-trunk build + libgcj regression test.
• gcjx build
• classpath CVS make distcheck
• classpath CVS builds with gcj 4.0.x, gcj-trunk, jikes and gcjx
  (Anthony is working on bootstrapping ecj so it can be added to the mix)

• jamvm build
• mauve batchrun run for jamvm/classpath/gcjx
• jacks run for gcjx

Regressions are posted to classpath-regressions. And on irc.gnu.org in #classpath there is a little cpbot that can give you the current status (just type =help). No fancy webpage results yet (the Cacao developers do have a nice mauve testresults comparison page). Hopefully much more will be added in the future. It has already been helpful catching some things really quickly which would otherwise only show up while creating and testing an new release.

Ruby, C, GCJ, SWIG, Lucene…

Ruby Central 2005 Codefest Grant recipients, number 4 is interesting:

4. Ruby Bindings to Lucene Search Engine (Brian McCallister)
Provide Ruby bindings to the Lucene (http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/)
search engine via SWIG and GCJ.

I couldn’t find how this was going. Or how it compares to the PyLucene implementation. But I found out that Luncen4C also has a GCJ backend for plain C programs. Seems gcj is becomming the glue between a lot of interesting languages.

With GNU Classpath 0.19 we also for the first time released a snapshot of the generics branch for people to play with. I have to admit that I have been concentrating mostly on the trunk and hadn’t been paying much attention to the generics branch. Much thanks to Tom Tromey for genericizing (is that a word?) a lot of packages and to Andrew Hughes for merging from trunk and maintaining the generics branch in a state so that we can do regular releases of it. It is amazing how much already just works. I hacked together a native-eclipse that uses the glibj generics zip from GNU Classpath and jamvm as launcher for the eclipse java projects. And it all just worked out of the box! :)

If you are lucky and have a PPC box running Debian unstable then Stephan Michels (tashiro) has some nice packages to play more with GNU Classpath generics (ecj-generics, jamvm-generics and even retroweaver to make it all work on your non-generics enabled runtime).

David Gilbert does it again.
Has JFreeChart Escaped the Java Trap? Yes!!!

Join FSF as an Associate Member!

Click that link! I need only 2 more referrals to receive this great gift!

BTW. The FSF started the GPLv3 update process.

For a long time we have needed a clear way to explain what we have been doing, how we do it and what our goals and road map are. When I was in Brazil a few months back David Wheeler discussed our progress, development model and goals with Bruno, Dalibor and me. As an outsider to our development community he was able to give us a clear picture of what we were actually doing. He has a nice writeup of the whole event. We discussed how to put down how we Build, Test and Deliver everything. And I asked several people and groups for input. But it is hard to get consensus on what are the essential things. Especially because we really wanted to put it all down in just 2 pages so it could be used as a quick reference for new people. Or used as a flyer at conferences.

Recently I spoke to various people who were happily surprised that various things we helped with (in particular Eclipse 3, Tomcat 5, ant, etc.) just worked with their latest Ubuntu and Fedora Core installations just using Free Software. Their surprise made me realize that we have to do a better job of communicating what we have done and how we are delivering it. So I just updated the document that we started during FISL to our current status and road map. I didn’t get it down to 2 pages, but 3 pages isn’t bad for a start. I cannot thank David enough for his patience and SouJava for bringing us together. But all mistakes in the final document are mine. This is clearly a first release, so please send corrections, additions, better pictures, translations, etc.

There is now a PDF, OpenDocument and OpenOffice (sxw) version of the paper: Escaping the Java Trap: A practical road map to the Free Software and Open Source alternatives. I also tried to export it as XHTML, but the result was not very readable. Help converting the document to other formats is highly appreciated. (Update: Thanks to Baron Schwartz there is now also a nice clean HTML version.)

I hope this document can be a base for more specialized support and marketing documents for our efforts. So please feel free to adapt it to your own needs and audience.

Battle of the runtimes!

Seems that after the release of JamVM 1.4.0 a lot of projects thought it was time to do an updated release (most based on GNU Classpath 0.19):

• SableVM 1.13-pre1
• IKVM.NET 0.22 (includes generics branch)
• Cacao 0.93

And slashdot claims GCC 4.1 Released (grin, they are about 2 months early…) But I am sure that when it actually releases it will certainly rock!

It is nice to have so much choice. And most of these projects are really mature now. The use of really different execution engines (interpreter, byte-code transformation, jit, aot or some hybrid) is really facinating to watch.

Seems I am unable to sent out email about the mailing list troubles so I hope some of the classpath subscribers will read about it here…

Subject: Lots of email bounces/unsubscribes
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 16:37:18 +0100

Hi,

I am seeing a lot of list traffic bounce and/or people being
unsubscribed because spamcop.net has lists.gnu.org in its RBL. If you
are (indirectly through your ISP) using spamcop you will probably not
receive this email. But I post it anyway for people reading the archives
after they have discovered their mail server has been blocking any
gnu.org emails.

I asked the savannah-hackers and gnu.org sysadmins to investigate but
till it has been resolved it would be good to not use the spamcop RBL.

Cheers,

Mark

Subject: savannah down (and list bounces again)
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 01:23:19 +0100

Hi all,

Seems this is a day that everything breaks down :{
My original email about the spamcop rbl block seems to have never
reached the list, so here it is attached again. And now savannah is
down. Several people have been paged to get the system back up, but
apparently everybody capable of doing that is located in an area
observing thanksgiving. So no ETA about when it will be available again.

Sorry for the bad news.

Cheers,

Mark

Subject: Savannah back up [Was: savannah down (and list bounces again)]
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 10:27:34 +0100

Hi all,

Seems my previous emails (forwarded below) have still not hit the
list :{ But the good news is that savannah is back up again:
http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=4136

Cheers,

Mark

Subject: mailing list troubles
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 12:17:32 +0100

Hi all,

I tried to warn about a couple of issues with the mailing lists and
savannah. But apparently I am one of the people trapped in some insane
spam fighting scheme. Attached are the messages I sent from my normal
email address. Unfortunately gnu.org currently doesn’t accept email from
that address (because it is refusing to handle sender verification
through null reverse paths [mail from: <> bounces]). I hope that some
people will at least get this message. If you are not receiving email,
or are not able to sent email to the various classpath mailing lists
please check the archives at
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/ or
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.classpath.devel

This being a long thanksgiving weekend for some people makes it
impossible to predict how long this will be an issue. I try to keep you
updated.

Yes, I understand the irony of trying to sent email about email not
working… I’ll try to post something on planet.classpath.org when I
know more.

Sigh,

Mark