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Posted by editor on April 11, 2007 at 7:41 AM PDT


Awaiting an answer to Apache's open letter

Yesterday, the Apache Foundation sent an open letter to Sun, written and signed by Harmony project VP Geir Magnusson Jr. It calls for Sun to license the Java Compatibility Kit (JCK) on terms acceptable to Apache, so that Apache can verify that Harmony, its implementation of Java SE, can pass compatibility tests and therefore call itself "Java-compatible":

The JCK license Sun is offering imposes IP rights
restrictions through limits on the "field of use" available to
users of our software.

These restrictions are totally unacceptable to us.

The letter then goes on to say that the restrictions are themselves inconsistent with the JCP, which prohibits specs from imposing contractual conditions that prevent licensees from creating or distributing implementations. But what are these restrictions? A companion FAQ is somewhat opaque on the specifics, but has one concrete example:

To give a concrete example from the Sun / Apache
dispute, if Apache accepted Sun's terms, then users of a
standard, tested build of Apache Harmony for Linux on a
standard general purpose x86-based computer (for example, a
Dell desktop) would be prevented from freely using that
software and that hardware in any application where the
computer was placed in an enclosed cabinet, like an
information kiosk at a shopping mall, or an X-ray machine at
an airport.

So, that's one side of the dispute, which Apache says has been going on since August of last year. Do they have a legitimate grievance? Tom Ball isn't impressed, and in the blog "Open Letter" or Extortion?, he decries Apache's decision to go public, and to do so now:

I just looked at my calendar and noticed that thirty days from today is smack in the middle of JavaOne, two days after Jonathan Schwartz's keynote. Mystery solved! This isn't about the Apache Harmony team's ability to work effectively -- it's instead a classic JavaOne slimy marketing ploy Java engineers have to endure each year. With the JavaOne schedule moved up I guess the mud had to start being thrown sooner.

Tom also thinks that Apache is asking for the wrong thing:

If I were in their position, I would instead ask that the JCK's current read-only license be rescinded so that the Harmony engineers can compile and run the tests specific to whatever they are individually working on to see what issues remain. IMHO, the JCK shouldn't be modifiable (it helps define the Java platform), but anyone should be able to compile and run it without legal hindrance. But that isn't what Mr. Magnusson seems to be asking for.

There are already lots of comments on Tom's blog, as well as Geir's (including an intersting perspective from Kaffe's Dalibor Topic). So this is an important situation that we'll be keeping an eye on for the next 30 days.

Also in today's Weblogs.
Vikram Goyal asks
Is outsourcing to India still financially relevant?
"I had an interesting phone chat with a friend based in Bangalore, India using Skype (I am based in Australia). While not going into specifics, he outlined his take home pay and as he was saying it, it hit me like a thunderbolt."

Finally, Airlan San Juan takes on the esoteric topic of Blu-Ray Java in
Postcards from the edge of Javaland:
"I could hear the crickets chirping, or at least the hum of the air conditioner fans as they strove to cool the bodies of several hundred enthusiastic and jumpy Java developers crammed into an auditorium of Google.com's New York City office. They were all here to listen to Rod Johnson talk about the Spring Framework, and I had just asked whether anyone knew about BD-Java."

In Java Today,
the next version of Java EE is kicking off with the JSR review ballot for JSR 313. The stated goals for the release are extensibility (specifically the addition of more extensibility points throughout the platform) and profiles (standard definitions of subsets of EE, possibly folding in other JCP-approved API'S). Also on the agenda is a little pruning: the JSR suggests marking some EE API's for removal in future versions of the spec, such as EJB CMP and JAX-RPC, which effectively been replaced by Java Persistence and JAX-WS, respectively.

The incubated jnxd project is a Java persistence framework for XML DataSources. Specifically, it's "a Java Framework to persist objects in XML DataSources without any OO-XML-like mapping. For this purpose, Native XML Databases and others supporting the concept of XML DataSource are the integration layer considered here. This simplifies the insertion, searchig, updating and deletion of XML documents and Nodes using a simple API called XML:DB API, and XQuery API for Java(XQJ)".

Mobile handsets such as cellphones typically have an address book to keep track of people we like to stay in touch with, a calendar to keep track of important events, and a to-do list to keep track of items we don't want to forget. This type of personal information is one of the most important functions found in a handset, just second to voice. You can use the PIM API for Java ME to enable your mobile Java applications to read and write to/from the locally stored personal information databases. You can even write synchronizers to keep your handset PIM data in-sync with remote PIM data stores. C. Enrique Ortiz's Managing Personal Information - An Introduction to the PIM API for Java ME, Part 1, the first part in a series of articles on using the PIM API for Java ME, provides a comprehensive introduction to the PIM API.

In today's Forums,
attodorov would like to know
Why is wsit DOM-based?
"Looking at the code of wsit , I have noticed that it uses the xmlsec libraray, which is DOM based. Therefore, one goes back to the stone age of using DOM, and not some StAX way to manipulate the xml. So even if the core of JAX-WS is Stax-based, and is advertised a lot to be very fast , etc, etc, if one wants to use a simple security operation on the SOAP envelope, one gets in trouble. Are there any plans to get rid of this DOM dependence?"

chrisab has some questions about
Tuning Java App on an 8-core Sun Fire T2000 Server:
"I am deploying a java app on an 8-core (32 simultaneous threads) Sun Fire T2000 Server running Solaris 10 and have some questions about tuning the app and the JVM for this platform. One thing that I have noticed is that the JVM starts up with 43 threads right out of the box. Is it normal for the JVM to do this (our JVM is build 1.5.0_09-b03)?"

Finally, larswestergren has some suggestions for the JavaOne organizers, in the thread
Re: Cool Stuff.
"From the conference scheduling application, I've seen that there is one real time car racing competition (like last year I presume), and also a "virtual duke" 3D t-shirt catching contest. Are there any other programming contests? Perhaps you should advertise the upcoming contests a bit more prominently on the Java One home page, a few pointers to what people should look into in order to maximise their chances of winning and so on? (Can you tell I'm really eager to compete this year? =)"

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Awaiting an answer to Apache's open letter

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