Mark J. Wielaard

Finally back in The Netherlands, adjusting to the cold Dutch summer after the warm Brazilian winter. Dalibor and I drew up at least 20 World Domination plans. But after seeing the enthousiasm in Germany and especially Brazil I am convinced we have already won. Just imagine standing in a huge room with hunderds of people around you shouting “Software Livre! Software Livre! Software Livre!”. South America is comming and the rest of the world better starts running now if they want to stay relevant.

At Guadec there were a lot of people interested in the progress we have made in the last year. A couple of people showed and told me about the projects that they were working on. But people seemed a bit shy to admit that they have already adopted GCJ and GNU Classpath for development. Gnome seems to be a bit of a hostile environment for introducing higher level languages and concepts (except for Python!). But I hope we will see some of these projects publicly announced soon. The difference with Fisl was enormous. At Fisl people were really pushing for adoption on all levels, from individual hackers, large user groups, companies to the government. There were a lot of really happy faces when we showed the working demos of GNU Classpath, Kaffe, GCJ 4, java-gnome and native Eclipse. And there was a lot of talk about pushing out more documentation, courses and books about what has been achieved so far.

I cannot thank the SouJava people enough for inviting us to Fisl 6.0. The experience was unforgettable. Thank you!

See our shared presentation on GNU Classpath & Kaffe. There are some extra slides at the end that we didn’t use during this presentation but that we did show either during our individual talks or when we were talking to people one-on-one.

I think I know why they call Europe the old continent. In Brazil they know how to party till 04:00 AM and still have a full program around all things Free Software from 09:00 till 20:00. Amazing amount of energy here. These people grok Free Software!

Dalibor and I are working together nicely. We seem to get the message across that diversity can go together with harmony, how we are making amazing progress, and how the TCK and JCP process are not helping us getting better and more compatible fast. Several big companies and government officials seemed to get that message.

Anthony Green gave me a nice hint for the demo. Install a local CVS repository to show the eclipse team diff handling. That was really nice to show. There was indeed no network available in the room that we presented (all the other rooms do have network). Thanks Anthony.

BTW. It is true! Dalibor has a large number of groupies here. And random girls walk up to him to get their picture taken with him.

Dalibor arrived in Stuttgart (08:00 good morning).

Lots of excitement after the Eclipse talk yesterday. People were really interested in the various plugins. The fact that Andrew had a powerbook with a native ppc version of Eclipse made some people really happy. The bugzilla plugin attracted interest. And people were even saying they would drop emacs for native eclipse (I think the talk went a bit too well…)

Today was the talk of Ben and Andrew Cowie Eclipse, Java-GNOME, Glade and GCJ. They made a nice combination. Andrew is pretty down to business. Giving the message “this combination is the only one that makes sense really”. Ben is the demo guru. The java-gnome Eclipse plugin and the quick and dirty slide show presentation application written using that plugin using gcj, java-gnome and glade (he actually used this application to show his slides!) was awesome. Again lots of interest after the talk.

The fact that people keep claiming that “suddenly” GCC 4.0 (gcj) appeared and made it all work is a bit annoying. We have been working on all this stuff for years. But apparently only just now people are seeing that all this actually works and fits perfectly together.

Guadec is interesting because the Gnome community is pretty big and they do work on lots of issues. You have application developers, gtk+ library hackers and kernel hackers doing interesting interaction. What was kind of missing though were the gcc, glibc, GNU autotools and friends. I think there could be some pretty interesting interaction with these groups. Gnome is now so big that they really should tackle the whole platform more constructively. Lots of talk is either detailed on specific applications, libraries or new cool kernel stuff or really high level stuff about “the next big thing” (collaboration?) or defining “what Gnome is” (not a distribution?). It isn’t really clear to me how or what Gnome as a whole should concentrate on now next. Maybe the Gnome community is so big now that they should actually break up into smaller communities that do some smaller parts really well. It will be interesting watching how Gnome goes forward. I am looking forward to better integrate our core libraries with the Gnome desktop.

Next up 6th International Free Software Forum (fisl).

Andrew and Ben gave a great performance. The The Eclipse IDE and you talk was really inspiring. People were clearly excited to check it out. Lots of specific suggestions for improvements to make it a really great Free Software hacking tool. Looking forward to Ben and Andrew Cowie their talk about java-gnome tomorrow (also using eclipse and gcj).

Guadec: 29 – 31 May, Stuttgart – Germany

• The Eclipse IDE and you
  Ben Konrath and Andrew Overholt
• Eclipse, Java-GNOME, and GCJ
  Andrew Cowie and Ben Konrath

6th International Free Software Forum (fisl): June 1 – 4, Porto Alegre/RS, Brazil

• Encontro Javali: Escape the Java Trap: Classpath and Kaffe, Implementing the Java Standards GNU Style
  Dalibor Topic and Mark Wielaard

LinuxTag: 22 – 25 June, Karlsruhe – Germany

• GNU Classpath
  Robert Schuster (in German)
• GCJ and Classpath: A Free Implementation of the Java programming language
  Andrew Haley (in English)

OSCON: 1 – 5 August, Portland, Oregon – USA

• The State of Free JVMs
  Tom Tromey

Where is the Harmony?

Things like the bad competition between KDE and GNOME is what keeps me interested in the harmony project. There is also good competition between these projects. And I do hope Harmony can be what freedesktop.org is for the larger free software desktop community. That is what we have always tried to do with GNU Classpath.

And it seems that is kind of happening now. We have even seen Apache hackers contributing patches to Kaffe (showing that the licensing issue can be overcome!). And there is a lot of talk on the list on the cutting edge research that is being done against all the free runtimes (Robert surprized me by posting about an university course on hacking JamVM).

And even gadek and I seem to agree for a change. He points out Snap which tries to show that what Harmony set out to be is already possible. Creating a collection of free libraries, runtimes, compilers, tools and applications to show what the community around GNU Classpath has produced these last few years. Hopefully people wanting to make Harmony a success check out these kind of collections and try out Kaffe OpenVM or GCC 4.0 to see how we can have harmony asap! (BTW. The Live-CD idea is really nice. I wish there was one for FC4test3 to show all the native stuff created with GCJ for those that don’t want to install a full FC4 test release.)

Thanks for the great gift Julian! GNU gjdoc 0.7.5. Updated GNU Classpath (CVS) docs at http://developer.classpath.org/doc/

Free AWT hackers observe and learn: Eclipse on SWT/GTK+ Performance Notes

Hurd-Gnome! Keep on rocking. Keep on hacking. Wow.

Roman checked in Kim Ho’s implementation of JFileChooser. And our Free Swing implementation is actually looking better and better each day. Quick screenshot of the new JFileChooser and jedit (main window, file system browser and search/replace dialog) in action (jamvm 1.3.0 + GNU Classpath CVS + cairo 0.3.0):

Sweet. (But no, jedit isn’t actually usable yet out of the box.)