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Working with the J2SE codebase

Posted by daniel on February 21, 2005 at 10:44 AM EST

Also - sitting during a standing ovation

Yesterday Kimmy-the-wonderwife and I went to a show that was good but not great. Stick with me, this is a Java related post - I promise. The music was very good, the performance of the music was good enough for a live show but I wouldn't buy the CD. The choreography was uneven and the dancing was definitely not top class. At intermission the people around us were discussing whether or not to stay for the second half. They did.

O.K., here is the part that I don't understand. After the show was over, a couple of dozen people sprinkled here or there stood up. I shook my head with disbelief. Then more and more people stood and suddenly my not standing was an unintendedly loud statement on my part. I enjoyed the show - it was good - it wasn't great. It wasn't stand up and shower the cast with applause great.

As I sat, I felt more and more pressure to stand. It was as if I was the only person who didn't understand the quality of what I'd just seen.

So here's why I'm telling you this. I've been thinking about this open source Java thing. A couple of people stood up and said let's do this. There were voices of reason on both sides who have contributed to the discussion. Noteably, Brian Behlendorf pointed out that no one is asking Sun to contribute their implementation, people are just asking that Sun makes it easier for an Open Source Java implementation to happen.

It seems that more people inside Sun are standing up. They can't open source Java and they aren't - but they are experimenting with different ways of meeting the needs of the community. In our Project Spotlight you can check out the open sourcing of JAI and JAI Image I/O. There are the weekly Mustang drops and a very active and visible Forum on suggestions for Mustang. If you can work within the constraints of the license (yes - I understand that for many, that is the crucial if) you can view much of the Mustang source code.

Now, more people are standing up and providing you with more opportunities to work with the core J2SE code. Peter Kessler introduces the latest project with Welcome to the Lab in today's Weblogs . He writes " When you have something really cool, please let us know! If you come up with a flying car, I definitely want to hear about it. If you have a bug fix or performance improvement that you think should be included in our next release, we encourage you to contribute it. We'll make sure your fix works on all of our supported platforms (40 of them for JDK 5.0!), in all our supported locales, passes the JCK tests, doesn't break backward compatibility, and all those other things about which we care deeply. If your contribution proposes API changes, we'll run those by our usual experts. (Of course, if you want to propose major new API's you should do that through the Java Community Process.) If your contribution is accepted for the next release of the platform, we'll also make sure the change gets documented in the release notes as needed, at least to acknowledge you as a contributor."

It's not open source. But, it is opening up the source and it is a way of involving more of the community. Maybe those at Sun who are not yet standing in support of opening up Java more and more to the community are starting to notice how few of them remain seated.

In other Weblogs, Doug Tilleager comes back to blogging with a cool post on the future of game machines " No matter what the PS3 turns out to be - because there still seems to be lots of missing data - it will be a machine that has more than just a few processing cores. This will be the case of all client machines in the not too distant future, so the industry will have to adapt. Most likely there will be three responses. Some people will not adapt, giving us games that only look incrementally better than the current generation. Some people will retire. And some people will step up to the challenge, harness the true power of these machines, and blow us away with the games that they create. I can't wait."

In Also in Java Today , Andrew Glover continues his developerWorks series on working with Groovy. In MVC programming with Groovy templates he begins with examples that show how Groovy makes " it easy to write multiline strings and to do run-time substitutions" and then uses it "to simplify report views using Groovy's template engine and the checksum reporting application " that he presented earlier in the series.

It's hard to design your application for scalability when you can't know which parts will be stressed by growth. But if you use a loosely coupled approach, you don't have to know--wait for the growth and then isolate the piece that needs to grow. In Amir Shevat's Designing a Fully Scalable Application, he introduces utilities provided by the MantaRay project that make it easier to distribute the resource-intensive parts of your application to one or more network boxes if necessary, all without rewriting your code: "...these utilities allow you to write the same code for your application whether it is running in a single JVM or distributed over several computers/JVMs."

In Projects and Communities, Kelly McNeill, in the osOpinion/osViews editorial Java-based iTunes coming to Linux writes "that Apple's music software is being ported to Java, albeit only for Motorola's Linux-based cell-phones."

The javasvet-jdkscg project's initial release provides localizations for Serbia and Montenegro, based in part on the JDK 1.4.2 solution for the no-longer-existent Yugoslavia. The project is an effort of JavaSvet, the Serbia and Montenegro JUG.

There are changes to the build coming in today's Forums. Kelly O'Hair writes "There are some changes planned for build 27 with regards to the way we build the debug version of java. Formerly this java was called java_g, and all the shared libraries also contained this "_g" suffix, e.g. libjvm_g.so, libjava_g.so, or jvm_g.dll and java_g.dll. The change will be the complete removal of this _g suffix and the creation of a separate and complete directory with no name changes (no "_g" suffix)."

Keeskuip asks [JAXB2.0] Is it possible to generate a xmlschema? "The annotations are great! Instead of creating a xmlschema I now create POJO's with annotations. But is it possible to create out of these POJO's a xmlschema?"

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Also - sitting during a standing ovation
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