Mark J. Wielaard

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.

Gary did it! (with a little help from jpackage)

It doesn’t look precisely like the example picture yet, but it is getting there.

If you are at LinuxTag, have your laptop with you, and want to see cool GNU Classpath demos please contact Robert

Unfortunately my notebook’s harddrive is faulty making it impossible for me to show running application’s :( (I am running Knoppix now) My plan was to show a plain Eclipse from eclipse.org which is compiled to native (using a recent GCJ snapshot) and maybe JamVM’s stunning interpreter performance using my little fosdemo (the one I had written for FOSDEM 2005). If someone wants to fix this situation and has a notebook to prepare the programs then please meet me at LinuxTag (Th/Fr/Sa, 10-18 o’clock).

I can confirm that his little fosdemo is pretty cool.

Spring, Jetty, and Velocity using GCJ on single board computers

We have integrated Spring, Jetty, and Velocity all on a SBC running embedded Linux. We compiled the Spring et al. under gcj 3.3 to native xscale object code. It works beautifully – it’s fast and reliable, with all of the Spring functionality intact.

Funky!

GNU Classpath/gcj presentations at LinuxTag

If you are near or in Germany please don’t forget to go to LinuxTag this
week (22 – 25 June, Karlsruhe).

On Saturday 25 June there will be 2 presentations on GNU Classpath/GCJ:

Robert Schuster – GNU Classpath (in German)

Andrew Haley – GCJ and Classpath: A Free Implementation of the java programming language (in English)

See also the full program on Saturday

Interesting statistics on book sales.
Especially in the light of the latest fedora rawhide updates showing lots of free packages going in now based on gcj. Debian/Ubuntu and the rest of the distributions will have to catch up quick. Although I hope the distributions will try to coordinate a bit on naming, versioning, etc. Fedora currently seems to try to cram out as much packages as possible. I actually like the way Debian only tries to push packages that are sane and ready. That doesn’t always give the quickest results of course. Fedora rawhide makes me feel like a little kid in a free-for-all candy store. Hope I won’t overeat!

Finally put up the pictures of Guadec 6 and Fisl 6.0.
 

David Wheeler also posted a nice Travelogue of his trip to Brazil, Fisl, lots of photos and some comments about our presentations.

And I stayed until 10pm, because several presentations were about Java implementations. People such as Bruno Souza (president of SouJava, a Brazilian Java user group that is a member of the Java Community Process), Dalibor Topić (lead maintainer of Kaffe), Mark Wielaard (lead for GNU Classpath, the leading OSS/FS Java core library implementation), and Geir Magnusson (lead for Apache Harmony) gave presentations. Information about OSS/FS Java implementations is really hard to get – particularly how all the pieces work together – and the FISL conference had many of the main leaders, so I really wanted to get the big picture. As you’ll see, I eventually got that insight, but it took some effort…

Robert asks:

What is this gcj-jit about? It sounds like an interface to the ahead of time compiler – something like a pseudo jit?

Ranjit replies:

See:
Using gcj as a JIT Compiler
For entertainment purposes only: gcj-JIT

Andrew’s comments are priceless:

You may find this interesting. On the other hand, you may find it totally horrible!
This isn’t yet ready for Prime Time, but IMO it’s a pretty impressive demonstration of the BC ABI.

Awesome!