Mark J. Wielaard

Norman Hendrich has supplied us with a stream of very high quality bug reports. Today he filed a “bug” to celebrate the hard work of Lillian, Roman, Tom F.,Tony and all other Free Swing and AWT hackers. It will be a pleasure to close this bug :)

Update: Norman said some nice things on the mailinglist:

a while ago I made myself some enemies complaining about the AWT/Swing support in gcj. Back then, I was really frustrated about obscure compiler bugs in gcj being fixed within minutes, while even small test programs would crash…

Since then, I swiched from testing gcj+classpath to jamvm+classpath. Overall, the progress with Swing is really astonishing, despite a few drawbacks due to added functionality (like the accessibility stuff, better plaf support, and the repainting refactoring).

Perhaps submitting bug reports with testcases made all the difference?

Some days during the last weeks, it really felt like I had three or four people working just for me: thanks Lillian, Roman, Tony, and Tom F. Naturally, thanks to all the other AWT and Swing hackers, too. I would submit a few bug reports in the morning from Hamburg, and fixes started to come in from all over the world the same day.

Thanks Norman! You truly are our “gui-testing-adversary”. People seem to really like to beat you at this testing game by fixing even the most cunning test you can throw at them.

First GNU Classpath irc coordination meeting

Please join the fun on irc.gnu.org in channel #classpath.

David showed that the JUnit swing frontend worked. And it pointed out some serialization issues with jcommon. So they got quickly fixed in GNU Classpath and now we have:

This looks like a useful tool to get more bugs fixed. Everybody loves seeing green bars! :)

DevJam Reports

The GNU Classpath distro DevJam was a great success. It seems we brought some harmony into the hearts and minds of the different distributions (Ubuntu, SkoleLinux, Debian, Fedora, Suse, Gentoo, OpenEmbedded) that participated. And being able to talk and debug some issues with several of the upstream projects involved (GNU Classpath, kaffe, gcj, Cacao) was definitely inspirational and productive.

Here is a list of summaries and notes of the meeting:

• SkoleLinux summaries and pictures
• OpenEmbedded ARM TODO list
• GCJ maintainer/Fedora impressions by Andrew Haley.
• Gentoo DevJam braindump by Petteri Räty (plus presentation)
• DevJam Arrival and Schedule/Discussion notes
• Debian Project leader notes
• LWN article about the meeting that is currently being published for subscribers (please support LWN it is a great magazine). Next week it will be free for all.

If you know of more reports, please send me, or the devjam mailing-list, updates and additions.

On request of several of the participants I have setup a DevJam mailing-list so people can keep in touch and coordinate cross-distro/packaging/project things.

If you are interested in participating or helping out with a
followup meeting please see the wiki about DevJam++.

David Gilbert added another Demo to GNU Classpath Examples:

Nice work! Free Swing is slowly getting better and better.

LWN article on Oldenburg DevJam

lwn.net published my article about the GNU Classpath distro DevJam – Europe.
Subscribe to LWN to read it now, or wait till next week when it is available for non-subscribers.

… but apparently not where the action really was.

Returning home I was greeted by an INBOX containing:

• Reworked JComponent and JViewport painting for much faster and flicker free swing by Roman.
• An imageio BMP-reader plugin by Sven.
• The start of java.util.Formatter by Tom.
• Completion of BoxLayout by Roman.
• Diffie Hellman key algorithms by Casey.
• A real DomainCombiner implementation by Santiago and Casey.
• javax.sound.midi implementation by Anthony.
• generic signature parsing code by Jeroen.

And another 60 “smaller” patches (and that is not doing justice to the work done by David, Lillian, Tony, Andreas and the others, but just summarizing everything would have taken me the rest of the day!) Truly an amazing amount of work done for a “long weekend”.

For an account of what was discussed at DevJam see the new blog of Andrew Haley. Lots of talk and little new code… It was very inspiring, but maybe I should just stay home when we are going to do DevJam++ to compensate for all the real work the amazing hackers above did!

No, we didn’t just drink beer. Wolfgang Bär and I (with some remote help from Lillian) got Jump Unified Mapping Platform starting up:

This will be a really nice application to get working completely, lots of stuff to fix :)

Advogato bloggers are back

Hurray!. Thanks to quad all the Planet Classpath advogator blogs have been reinstated.

Sorry for those with advogato diaries. I have temporarily removed them from Planet Classpath till I figure out where advogato went.