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OpenJDK sets the stage for growth

It's been a long time coming, but OpenJDK may finally be passing muster with the toughest critics from the open-source community. To wit: it now has a debian.org package.

Dalibor Topic marks this important occasion in his blog, QotD: Debian Overview of openjdk-6 source package, which he begins by quoting the first log comment:

[2008-07-12] Accepted 6b10dfsg-1 in unstable (low) (Matthias Klose)

Dalibor then goes on to explain why this is a Big Deal:

OpenJDK in main is not only great because it means a lot of other Free Software Java-based packages can now more easily follow suit and enter main as well - it also means that a lot of the thorough work done by the OpenJDK community in the past weeks paid off in an OpenJDK source code tarball that was cleaned up to meet the hardest standard of all distributions."

So, going forward, Debian package managers will be able to assume the existence of Java -- in unstable for now, but that'll change over time -- and add packages that depend on Java, simply by expressing this dependency.

Dalibor is also the host of the newest Java podcast, the OpenJDK Podcast. In OpenJDK Podcast Season 1 Episode 1: Thomas Fitzsimmons on IcedTea, Dalibor talks with Thomas Fitzsimmons of Red Hat, who explains what the IcedTea project is, how it came about, its role for Fedora, trademarks, certification, gcjwebplugin, netx and the portable Zero interpreter for Hotspot.

Also in Java Today, The New York Times reports on an ambitious adoption of Blu-Ray's BD-Live -- the presence of expanded local storage, picture-in-picture and internet access in addition to the mandatory Blu-Ray Disc Java (BD-J) -- for Sleeping Beauty and other upcoming Disney Blu-Ray discs, in the article Disney Taps Into Blu-ray's Interactive Technology. "All of these activities are possible because of a technology that connects Blu-ray discs with the Internet, which the entertainment industry is calling BD Live. Disney and other studios, including Lionsgate and Sony, believe that BD Live could be Blu-ray's killer app, potentially altering the tepid response that consumers have given Blu-ray to date."

Winston Prakash is wondering about interest in his latest prototype, in Generic Web Page Designer for Netbeans, anyone? " I thought it is worth a time to explore the concept of a generic Web  Page Designer, with out any restrictions of any particular framework. If you are interested, you can read my proposal for a generic Web Page Designer at http://wiki.netbeans.org/WebPageDesigner The proposal includes Web Page Designer Concept Overview and Web Page Designer Design Concepts. I also spent some time to create a prototype of a HTML designer. [...] This HTML designer embeds Mozilla Layout Engine (XULRunner) for rendering the web pages. Therefore, unlike Visual JSF designer, user would get hi-fidelity rendering of the web pages. Details on embedding Mozilla in Netbeans is available here."

Today's Weblogs begins with Fabrizio Giudici going through Various updates from me (J2ME, JSON, travels - and blueMarine, of course), starting with project windRose. "I had recently to deal with J2ME for business and this ended up in resuming the work on windRose, my open source navigator for palm devices, which hadn't been updated in two years (since version 0.4.1, rough to use but trusted enough to record all of my travels in the meantime). The new windRose 0.5.4 has less rough corners and some new features, such as maps (OpenStreetMap and Microsoft Visual Earth), waypoints and even weather information."

Masoud Kalali notes that a GlassFish refcard is available for download for free. "If you are a GlassFish user then you will definitely like this reference card as it contains many of day to day information which you may need. It will ease the pain of looking for a command or tip in the web or reference manuals."

Finally, Arun Gupta announces a Exciting Job Opportunity in GlassFish Scripting Team. "Do you want to work in Scripting and Dynamic Languages and associated Web frameworks such as Ruby/Rails, Groovy/Grails, Python/Django and learn the Open Source work culture Work with and in the GlassFish team in a dynamic, innovative and fast-paced environment? Are you a new graduate and do you have it in you ? Buckle up, fasten your seatbelt and apply here. This has been a very exciting journey for me so far and we need your help in taking this to the next level."

In today's Forums, kirillcool questions the practicality of a ground-up rewrite of Swing's much-criticized file chooser, in Re: FileChooser component, please!. "Your multiple posts on the JFileChooser on Windows platforms over the past couple of years indicate great attention to all the small details that vary even between the Windows platforms. Now take that and extend to other supported platforms, including playing nicely with Mac, even if it's not developed directly by Sun. Now take that and extend to non-system look-and-feels, including core Metal / Nimbus and the existing third-party look-and-feels. So, yes, it still does not compare with a web browser. But it is a gigantic task as compared to other core Swing components, if you do want to provide complete platform fidelity for all the target platform. I have asked this before, and i will ask once again. Would you undertake to reimplement it from the scratch? If the answer is "no, i don't have time due to all these other things that are more important to me", the same would be true for the other side as well."

cinsulan wants more flexibility in LWUIT layout, as explained in Question: Flexible menu position?. "This is something that has been bothering me for a while. I can choose whether I want the menu to appear on forms throughout the whole application using UIManager.getInstance().getLookAndFeel().setReverseSoftButtons(true/false); There are instances, and in my application a critical one, where I would like the menu on a different side than on most of the other forms in the application. It might sound counter intuitive to change the position of the menu, but in this case it's really not. Is there any way of accomplishing this?"

Finally, mshaffer55 looks at the JAXB spec and its practical use in Re: XJC complex type derived by restriction from another complex type derived. "The issue is that, unlike for extension, Java has no obvious analog for restriction. The JAXB 2.1 spec indicates that restriction should be treated exactly the same as extension, i.e. a subclass should be created, but "...there is no requirement that Java properties representing the attributes or elements removed by the restriction to be disabled.". So a restriction of this kind would be pretty much useless, since the resulting subclass would be identical to the base class. Anyway, based on my reading of the spec, which is reasonably clear on this point, I'm surprised by this error. You could try submitting a defect that points to this thread, and see what happens."

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