...but tantalizingly closer to an unencumbered JDK

Back in May, we noted Red Hat's plans for OpenJDK, which involved using code from GNU Classpath in an effort to remove the remaining IP-encumbered code from OpenJDK, most obviously the graphics rasterizers we heard so much about at JavaOne 2007. Today, we've got an update on that, thanks to the OpenJDK community leaders, who came across the Fkung blog and started cross-posting its updates to the OpenJDK page.

It's not immediately obvious who Fkung is -- the blog's about page is empty, though a January entry indicates that he or she is an intern at Red Hat, working though the summer on Classpath -- but whoever's writing it has some pretty exciting developments to report. It starts with a "major milestone" on June 25, regarding IcedTea graphics: for the first time, Java2D and Swing are shown to work with the Classpath-integrated graphics bits. And it looks like it's been a hard road getting there:

Graphics are a major encumbrance in the OpenJDK; however the encumbered parts are only critical bits and pieces - not wholesale packages. This makes their replacement all the more difficult; we could throw away all of OpenJDK’s graphics code and completely replace it with Classpath (something I believe Roman Kennke is working on, by plugging Classpath’s GTK peers into the OpenJDK), but I’ve opted to keep as much of the OpenJDK’s X11 code as possible and get that working (including compatibility fixes with colour management and raster creation). If both of our efforts succeed, we’ll have two working toolkits in Linux - pluggable toolkits anybody?

That entry indicated that fonts were still unsupported, but those got added the next week, as detailed in IcedTea fonts. "IcedTea has basic font support using Freetype! Of course it’s nowhere as complete as it would need to be to completely replace T2K, but it’s a good stopgap measure until Sun releases their internal code." The latest update, from Friday, reports more progress:

The rendering problems from my last post have been cleared up, and IcedTea now has basic font support looking quite decent. Metrics-calculation still isn’t working, which affects the Swing/AWT layout managers (I’m not sure where this is done: the native graphics code doesn’t seem to be called), but the rest seems good.

That said, a comment on an earlier entry suggests proceeding slowly with the Freetype integration. "Dmitry" of the Java2D team writes "You might want to hold off doing that, as our font guys are very far on the path of integrating Freetype as a plug-in font renderer for openjdk," and says an update will be posted to the font-scaler-dev mailing list. Presumably, that update is Quick update on project status, posted on June 29, which reports that the "proposed fix for replacing encumbered T2K library with freetype is under code review." Following what's expected to be a lengthy review, the "changes will start making their way to master workspace and going public."

So, possible duplication of effort aside, you can see from a little spelunking between blogs and mailing lists that there's signficant progress to be reported in un-encumbering the graphics bits of the JDK. And that's pretty good news...