Mark J. Wielaard

Pleasantly surprized by all the documentation on java-gnome. It has a quick primer, a full tutorial, a java-gnome and Glade guide and a special tutorial on TreeView (which is good because TreeView is so powerful that it is daunting to know where to start), full api reference (not yet generated with gjdoc though), and lots of little hints and tips.

Also good to see so much discussion about Owen Taylor’s notes on java-gnome and the introduction of toggle references. Lots of stuff to do and lots of excitement on how to make it all happen.

GCC 4.0.0 is released! That was a lot of fun. Don’t you love the smell of release panic. GCJ 4 is a very nice release. Even though it is now based on a two month old GNU Classpath. But thanks to Michael Koch people can enjoy a fresh core library in CVS. Hopefully some of that goodness will make it in 4.0.1.

Julian Scheid released gjdoc 0.7.4. We have updated documentation on developer.classpath.org. And we now also have inetlib documentation online. Nicely linked together with the GNU Classpath core class documentation. In the future we might see the resurrection of the TexiDoclet. Nicely printed documentation and info files. Hurray!

Anthony Green is bribing hackers to produce even more code for GNU Classpath. Although I am all for free t-shirts he should probably have invited people to write more tests for Mauve and test real world free software applications based on GNU Classpath and GCJ. We are almost at the million lines of code mark, so coders is not something we are really short on!

And he shouldn’t have been so cheap and offer t-shirts from the company he works for :) Real hackers want something from the FSF GNU-shop! If you are pushing your company swag then please offer people a Fedora Core 4 CD so they can help by using and testing our stuff in a ready to go free environment! FC is really cool and should be promoted more to those that want a free replacement platform now without waiting for the other distros to catch up.

Speaking of the FSF, please join us now and share the software! Let them know MJW inspired you to join. Then my friends can hear the voice of freedom when they call me.

LWN has now freely published the GCJ 4 article. The intensity of the comments is a bit surprizing.

Been talking a lot about licenses, communities, bridges and compromises. In Boston last year Dalibor and I had a little workshop around that same issue. The discussion slides ”The Free Software Community, the GPL, Compromising, Trust and Control” are now online as html since I hope it explains why the GPL grows such good communities. It doesn’t clearly explain when to make compromises like we did for GNU Classpath. It was a really short presentation since we wanted to have a lot of discussion. The GPL paper by David Wheeler has some numbers to put it all in context.

Compared to the Classpath boys Sisyphus had it easy.

He, thanks, I guess, Boudewijn :)

Happy to see Eric Anholt working on adding ActionScript to Swfdec using Mozilla SpiderMoneky (yes, Mozilla has a javascript engine written in the C and one in the java programming language [Rhino], both dual -licensed under the MPL and GPL). Eric also runs the Kaffe Tinderbox on freedesktop.org. Some people are just great.

The FSF now has a news item on Free Java and Free Flash.

GCC 4.0 RC1

GCC 4.0 has been frozen and a
GCC 4.0 RC1 is available. Please test and report bugs/regressions.

Saw that people are using gcj to create a visual javascript editor using Rhino called Banteng. The RSS Reader demo is cool. It doesn’t depend on GCJ 4, you can actually use the last stable release of GCJ 3.x.

My article about GCJ 4 was accepted by LWN. It even got a couple of nice replies (and some trolls).

The banteng program was made using SWT. But the java-gnome hackers also think windows users deserve some Freedom. Wicked.

planet.classpath.org back in the air

As soon as all the DNS servers have been updated planet.classpath.org should be back again for your reading pleasure. Sorry for the interruption. A mirror can be found at developer.classpath.org if you are impatient.

Interesting paper from the latest PyCon 2005 Pulling Java Lucene into Python: PyLucene

As OSAF needed an open source text search engine library for its Python based project, Chandler, we made the following bet: what if we pulled together Java Lucene, GNU’s gcj Java compiler and SWIG to build a Python extension ?

This paper examines the issues of pulling an open source Java library into Python, matching the differences in memory management, thread support and type systems. It also describes a technique for extending a Java class from Python by providing a python implementation to a Java extension proxy.

Other exciting news is that Andrew Hughes fixed the GNU Classpath generics branch so that it could be bootstrapped with jamvm 1.3.0!

Saw that Caolan keeps a blog describing the OpenOffice.org 2 progress with gcj. He is seeing great speedup from gcj4 native compiled code, but the build times for some parts of OOo are enormous:

Use gcj-dbtool during the build for gcj. This has a huge impact for me building multilanguage langpacks as helpcontent2 is a heavy java user, my experience is a 20hour build with interpreted bytecode and an 8 hour build with gcj-dbtool and -Dgnu.gcj.precompiled.db.path

Tom Tromey posted a status update on gcjx. Still a lot of work to be done for full 1.5 language support. But it looks like there is a lot of progress being made on replacing the current gcj frontend:

gcjx can parse all 1.4 and most 1.5 language features. […]
gcjx does pretty well on jacks – much better than gcj. I think I counted 70 gcj front end PRs that are fixed in gcjx. […]
As of today, I can compile most of libjava using the tree back end

Sad to see Ranjit struggling with non-free proprietary software while there is so much Free Software available to help with what he is trying to accomplish.

GNU Classpath class documentation currently only comes in HTML. But is generated using gjdoc which can also generate texinfo or raw xml. From that you can generate info, docbook, pdf, etc. Evince is just the GNOME frontend for the new freedesktop Poppler pdf renderer used by both the GNOME and KDE hackers. It is under active development. Netx a free JNLP implementation that just works with GNU Classpath based execution engines:

/usr/local/gcc40/bin/gij -jar netx-0.5.jar -jnlp http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/Compare.jnlp