Calvin Austin's Blog

May 2006 Archives

Java and the Titanic

Yesterday I spent several hours walking through the Java pavilion floor, lots of great stuff to see and some good giveaways by the vendors here. I also stumbled upon a photo opportunity of James with the Dukes Choice awards

Javaone: w/images Java SE and Java EE keynote pt2

Bill quoted some numbers, that with all the Java EE 5 features the adventure builder demo is now 36% smaller (down from 67 classes to 43) but even more impressively a simple XML app was down from 5 files to 1. He cited the Glassfish project had reached 300K downloads.

The next section was the new features in Java SE. Its interesting to me to see the number of Sun Java EE engineers now working on Java SE features. Java SE was never got the respect it deserved inside Sun (imho), Java ME and Java EE due to their associated revenue got more of the attention. New Java SE engineers include Danny Coward who will now be the Dolphin Spec lead (a fellow brit) and Roberto for XML/AJAX.

So one of the more non-incremental features planned is a transition plan for Visual Basic developers to the Java platform, a project called Semplice. This is well overdue, especially given the Java-Sun settlement all those years ago.

Another feature was project Phobos, the ability to call Javascript to Java, following on from the petstore AJAX demo earlier in the day.

The rest of Java 7 may include native XML, friends, Swing application framework and Beans bindings, dyanamic language support. My first glance of native XML was that I didn't like it, it may be clever but including raw XML as per the slide make things more messy for me.

Finally if you don't like lines, Javaone still has teething issues with the new schedule tools. To get into the Java SE session took 10 minutes and then another 5-10 minutes to get out again!

Javaone: w/images Java SE and Java EE keynote pt1

The GUI looks nice and 10 years on the gray/grey rectangle is gone.

But as a Java Linux user I want a 64bit plugin, the number 4 feature on the web site. I doubt whether one will be around for beta2 in June for final release in October. Next up is Bill Shannon with Java EE 5 which was approved a couple of weeks back

Javaone news highlights. Open Source Java

Next came one of the conference sponsors, Ed Zander with Motorola who picked up a duke choice for a Motorola phone. Then the JDK java distro license change was introduced by Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame. Jonathan hinted about Ubuntu on 'servers', which of course ubuntu already runs on servers and then asked about support on ubuntu on Sparc. Mark did not confirm anything.

Next Marc Fleury came on with a red hat(beret) and hinted some collaboration with Sun and Redhat and that redhat was joining Netbeans. Redhat have been making their own eclipse edition so far.

Next Rich Green was invited to say that Sun is working out how to open source Java and not whether it would be open sourced. Given the time to open source solaris I wouldn't expect anything to happen for a while. I hope this is a real announcement and not playing for time.

Next Jeff Jackson is talking about Java EE 5. Which is already has an open source implementation and had the jcp members stand on stage and Jeet to discuss how to use blogs from the Glassfish community! ...

Next came J2EE and AJAX demos from Craig and Greg, knowing Craig the beer finder was a useful google mashup

Javaone news: Java on Linux the real story

For reasons that date back to the 90s, and which were never meant to cause GNU/Linux a problem (as at the time it wasn't really on the radar), the Java platform has been licensed in such a way that GNU/Linux distributions couldn't carry it. In addition, the Sun-provided installer for GNU/Linux has, to be charitable, sucked.

Now for those with good memories, of course linux was around in the 90's, infact the original license for JDK 1.1 was friendly to many distributions and made many flowers bloom. Things changed with Java 2 and the SCSL license, of course every linux distribution wanted to have Sun Java on their CD and Sun had agreements with Redhat, Suse, Caldera and others. Any of the restrictive terms were due to Suns binary license and no-one else, for example the license click through on download and install was introduced later and enforced on blackdowns distribution. So Sun built the wall, and forced the click-through sucky installer and knew what it did.

"An unprecedented collection of Debian developers, Ubuntu developers, Sun engineers and Sun lawyers has spent months devising a new binary license for the Java platform"

I can't believe it took this much effort, kudos for those 'unprecedented collections' of Debian and Ubuntu developers for waiting, anyone who uses those distributions knows that they have invested effort into virtual packages anyway to handle offline distributions. Like Wei adds, does this mean fedora will be JDK ready, perhaps...if it does, it will be down to the effort of individuals of course, taking Java back to its roots.

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