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Posted by editor on June 8, 2007 at 11:35 AM EDT

What'll it take to unencumber OpenJDK

I came across Mark Reinhold's blog entry Slides from "OpenJDK Project Report" @ JavaOne 2007 while poking around OpenJDK, and noted the coincidence that it has been exactly one month today since he presented this talk at JavaOne 2007.

So, you guys done yet?

Kidding! But given that most of the Sun people should now be through their post-J1-crunch comp time, it probably is an appropriate time to start taking stock of big plans announced at the show and how long it will take to get there. For OpenJDK, the big to-do is obviously the replacement of encumbered bits with GPL'able replacements. Who's on it? How're they doing? How long's it going to take? Mark's blog has some interesting specifics about the projects started to replace the dependencies: audio-engine, font-scaler, and graphics-rasterizer. He also has metrics on how much of the JDK source is encumbered: 894 files, or 4%, cannot be shipped as source, and 1,885 files (8%) are not under GPLv2, many because they are Apache-derived.

That should help to establish reasonable expectations about what it's going to take in terms of effort to get to a 100% GPL class library, and the specific skill-sets needed from the community to pull it off.

So, as you crunch those numbers in your head, the latest java.net Poll asks "When will the OpenJDK project be able to offer an unencumbered, 100% GPL class library?" Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page for current tallies and discussion.

One other thing I'm wondering aloud... are the strident F/OSS-only Linux distros waiting for every last bit to go GPL, or are they willing to adopt OpenJDK now? Maybe some of you in the Linux community could give us a sense of how this is playing in that part of the online world...

Speaking of communities working on the core Java platforms, the Java Today section points out the white paper The GlassFish Community Delivering a Java EE Application Server (620 KB, PDF), which takes a high-level look at one of java.net's most active communities. "A year and a half after the initial launch, the GlassFish community has already delivered its first final release and is on its way to its second. In this article we will provide an overview of all the aspects of the GlassFish Community and the GlassFish AppServer."

Jeff Martin's latest JavaFX update is on Key Frame Animation in JFXBuilder/JavaFX: "In the last week we've been adding animation support to JFXBuilder. Fortunately, JFXBuilder's existing key frame animation model matches well with JavaFX - in particular, using the JavaFX "dur" statement. [...] JFXBuilder already has an animation panel that lets you animate almost any shape attribute: x, y, width, height, rotation, scale, skew, opacity, color, stroke color and stroke width. To define an animation, you simply draw a shape or drop a component, move the animation time slider to a different time, and change the attributes for the new time. JFXBuilder will automatically interpolate all the values between the two key frames."

The 124th issue of the JavaTools Community Newsletter is online, with tool news from around the web, announcements of new projects in the community, and a tool tip explaining why you should move your project's source control to Subversion.

In our latest JavaOne Community Corner Podcast j1-2k7-mtH06: A peek into Bunny Hunters, a Darkstar based game, Project Darkstar founder and community leader Jeff Kesselman introduces Bunny Hunters, a demo game written to run on Darkstar.

In today's Forums, "GB Developer" has an open-ended Question about GF history I'd love some details on this. How did glassfish come about? when/why did you fork other codebases and what was the driver of that? Just in case you're wondering why I'm interested... I'm considering a migration to GF, and (good or bad), I don't want to base that choice on just technical merit (real or perceived... oh, the flamebait!). All other technical considerations being equal (or nearly equal), I'd like to take into consideration such things as community, activity, the number of 'warm fuzzies' I get by reading the dev list. — 

abhayani explains a seeming duplication in Re: HTTP Servlet RA. "Why two RA's? Because both of them have completely different functionality. Http Servlet RA is a Server side component which only accepts the incoming request and sends response to it just like Web Server hosting HttpServlet never creates new Requests. While HttpClient RA can be a full blown implementation of HttpCLient and which is responsible for creating the HttpRequest, receive response in Sync or Async way like a true Client side component."

"Fork Labs" offers an update on jai-operators: "I made a new build of my jai-operators project. It contains among other things an operator to apply any point operation (such as pow() and sqrt()), an operator to apply the same operation on a collection of images (the first renderable collection operator!), a pipeline operator and the famous DFT3D and IDFT3D along with a 3d periodic shift. I would appreciate if you could take a look and send me comments."

In today's Weblogs. Bhakti Mehta continues her web services series of blogs with WS-Reliable Messaging and Session Support (Part3). "This is the third part of tri series blogs where in Part 1 we showed one way of supporting sessions with WS Reliable Messaging. Mike showed in his blog WS Reliable Messaging and Session Support Part 2 what are the problems with this approach and we now conclude with a third part where we have tried to fix some of these problems."

In Dynamically sizing threadpools, Scott Oaks writes: "Thread pools can typically be dynamically resized, but is that a feature you should take advantage of? In a word -- no."

Finally, John O'Conner digs into the Swing Application Framework Architecture. "The first of a brief series, this post summarizes the Swing Application Framework."

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What'll it take to unencumber OpenJDK
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