Mark J. Wielaard

David Gilbert gave us some good news:

And Andrew Haley quoted some wise words:

When a very well-known and widely respected computer scientist recently used [lines of code as a measure of] programmer productivity in a lecture, the suggestion came from the audience that, instead of talking about “the lines of code produced” we should talk about “the lines of code used” and that, therefore, the speaker was booking them on the wrong side of the ledger. The speaker answered that he stuck to his productivity measure, because he did not know of any alternatives that allowed proper quantification!

From Two views of Programming by Edsger W. Dijkstra. (EWD540)

Weeee!
This is mainly a bug fix release for issues found with eclipse 3.1 and Free Swing applications just after our 0.16 release. But it also includes some exciting new features.

XML DOM, XPATH and XSL fixes. Free Swing is much more responsive. JInternalFram, JTree, JMenu, JTable, JButton and JFileChooser fixes. FileChannel lock and force implementations added. The logging FileHandler now rotates files. Clean locking and namespace for gtkpeer library. System call interrupts and timeouts are now handled correctly for net and nio. Corba bug fixes. Lots of documentation updates. The VM Integration Guide now comes with a full section on the VM/Classpath hooks. GNU Classpath Examples now includes a Tree World demo.

21 people actively contributed code to this release and made 171 CVS commits during the two weeks of development.
diffstat since 0.16: 3638 files changed, 25798 insertions(+), 15596 deletions(-)
This release passes 29508 out of 30320 Mauve core library tests.

Now that was fun!

Played a bit with the latest Cacao Tomclipse release. This runtime has matured nicely. It is way more stable then the old 0.91 release. As the screenshot page shows real world applications now just work and on a wide range of processors (Alpha, i386, MIPS (64-bit), PowerPC (32-bit) and x86_64). And it actually is really snappy. Nice that it is easy to test against GNU Classpath CVS with a simple configure option. And very reassuring to notice eclipse works much better with current CVS then with the 0.16 release that is bundled with Cacao. So we will certainly make a new GNU Classpath release tomorrow.

Lillian checked in a JTree icons patch and says our JTree is now working “upto par”.

Europe rejects software patents!

European Parliament says no to software patents, yes to innovation. Thank you Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. Thank you economic-majority.com. And thanks to all those individuals that called, phoned, faxed and demonstrated these last couple of years. Hopefully this shows that european democracy can work. Even if it takes a lot of time and energy. The people from the FFII really did a good job, and I hope that they will continue to educate politicians in the future (hint: Donate to the FFII!)

And amazingly even Red Hat and Sun are friends when it comes to oposing software patents. They went as far as releasing a joint press release:

Sun and Red Hat, […], set aside their competitive differences in this process. Both companies felt the interests of free and open source software merited cooperation at a high level.

Seems Sun has learned a lesson or two. Now Lets see if they can put this new friendship into real actions in the future.

STOP Software Patents in Europe!

How you can help

• Join the web demo
• Join the economic-majority.com
• Join the demonstration in Strasbourg

If you cannot attend the demonstation in Strasbourg in person please phone or fax your member of the European Parliament (MEP). Or better yet discuss the situation with others you work with and send a company FAX to show them how this new legislation will hurt your business if the Buzek-Rocard-Duff amendments are not adopted by parlement on Wednesday. If you don’t inform your parliament, mega-corporations are doing the job for you: “The European Parliament is filled with lobbyists of Microsoft, Eicta, CompTIA and so on. There are 30 to 40 lobbyists permanently roaming the halls.”

Join us now…

Jerry Haltom and Robert Schuster have (re)joined Planet Classpath. Make sure you read their announcements of the Ubuntu GCJ4 Eclipse packages and the GNU Classpath presentation at LinuxTag 2005 and the accompanying paper.

We released 0.16 (code name “Harmony”)!

AWT GtkScrollBar and GtkImage improvements. All image operations are now working correctly. Graphics2D has been upgraded to use Cairo 0.5.x. Free Swing updates for 1.5 top-level compatibility. JTree interface completed. JFileChooser has been implemented. Completed implementations of BoxLayout, GrayFilter and SplitPane. Upgraded the Corba features to 1.3 and included new CORBA 2.3 features. Start of generic JDWP framework. And lots of bug fixes based on real world application usage.

31 people actively contributed code to this release and made 389 CVS commits during the last two months of development (that is 6.5 commits each and every day). diffstat since 0.15: 1248 files changed, 133649 insertions(+), 41802 deletions(-) That is up 6312 lines (or 105 lines per day) of pure source code since 0.15 (according to sloccount). We now PASS 28,801 of 29,590 Mauve tests (up from 27,325 out of 27,959 with 0.15).

Or as David Gilbert calls it “Relentless progress!”:

• Essien Ita Essien on GNU GOATS on JAVA
  

  Business as we know it is changing fast, and innovations like this are the reason. Like I said earlier, these are exciting times.

• OSNews on Fedora, Java And GCJ
  

  Along with the large number of free and open source Java packages made available in Fedora Core 4 already, more are being added to rawhide compiled with GCJ. These include Lucene, additional Jakarta components, and more. You can read the rawhide reports in Fedora Test to track the rolling development updates.

• Lambda the Ultimate on understanding Generics
  

  Are these problems a selling point for better type systems, or another barrier to adoption?

Last week I tried to help Michael with the Debian native Eclipse package and this week I played a bit with the Fedora JOnAS package. It thought me to respect the work of the packagers a lot more. Gary explained how to get a package dependency graph. So I tried to make one for Eclipse and Jonas. But there are just too many dependencies to create anything that is actually helpful.

ant-*, axis, bcel, classpathx-mail, eclipse-ecj, eclipse-rcp, gcc-java, gjdoc, gnu-crypto, jakarta-commons-*, java-1.4.2-gcj-compat, jessie, jsch, ldapjdk, libgcj, log4j, mx4j, tomcat5-*, wsdl4j, xml-commons-resolver

	avalon-framework, avalon-logkit, axis, bcel, carol, castor, classpathx-mail, eclipse-ecj, gjdoc, gnu-crypto, hsqldb, jakarta-commons-*, java-1.4.2-gcj-compat, jdom, jessie, jgroups, jonathan-core, jonathan-jeremie, joram, ldapjdk, libgcj, log4j, mx4j, objectweb-anttask, p6spy, struts, tomcat5-*, velocity, werken.xpath, wsdl4j, xdoclet, xjavadoc, xml-commons-resolver

And I only listed the most important dependencies of these programs. The amount of packages that are now freely available build upon GCJ4 is amazing. And it is fun that you can now also play with things like tomcat or axis out of the box. But how any packager is going to stay sane is beyond me :)

It shows how important projects like Gump are.

Sven was kind enough to do a little braindump of his thoughts on GNU Classpath Graphics2D Images and Text support.