David Herron's Blog

April 2008 Archives

Java 6 for OS X

It's been how long? Thank you Apple for getting this out! Anyway, Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1: This Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1 adds Java SE 6 version 1.6.0_05 to your Mac. This update does not replace the existing installation of J2SE 5.0 or change the default version of Java.

Oh, and, 13949712720901ForOSX

On hacking the OpenJDK

I'm giving a session at JavaOne this year titled "Hacking the OpenJDK" and it's been very interesting sitting with this topic these last few months. Much of the presentation is an overview of the developer guide, source repositories and other infrastructure on openjdk.java.net which anybody 'hacking' the OpenJDK will need to get started. All that is pretty straightforward and obvious what to cover and how to present it. What's been interesting is what might be some common hacking scenarios with the OpenJDK code.

My co-presenter is the one preparing the demos, and while we have some interesting demos lined up he wanted to know if y'all had any thoughts on "hacks" you'd like to see. The comment box below is available for y'all to leave us ideas. And please remember that we have 50 minutes for the session, 30 minutes will be taken with me talking through the OpenJDK project overview, leaving 20 minutes for demos and questions.

The most interesting and most controversial idea in the session is: how to remove CORBA. I thought it's obvious, the most common change people want in the Java platform is to ditch CORBA. That is, unless you're one of the two people who actually use CORBA, I suppose. Feedback from colleagues was a "are you sure it's our party line to suggest making incompatible changes?" While that's a fair criticism I a) wanted to make it clear the OpenJDK is an open source project and any change is fair game, and b) that some changes create incompatibilities and that there is value in maintaining compatibility with the platform spec. In any case it's not too hard to hack the OpenJDK to remove CORBA, but I'll leave the details until my session at JavaOne.

The session ID is: TS-5230

Interplanetary migrations

I've been subscribed to Planet Classpath and Planet JDK for a couple years. This blog has been aggregated into Planet JDK for a long time, and Planet Classpath was always a "them" aggregation. But, yeah, as Mark Reinhold says, we've been working closely together for awhile and as Mark Wielaard said we now have an ambassador from Planet Classpath in the Planet JDK team. As odd as it is to see my blog being aggregated into Planet Classpath, I welcome this change. May it lead to greater harmony in the movement to Free Java.

Maybe all the Doctor Who episodes I've been watching recently has something to do with this interplanetary exchange.

OpenJDK 6, tastes great, less filling!

It seems the java world is in a bit of an uproar right now with a bit of news which I've seen blogged and newsed about in several places. First, Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04; not 'Hardy Herron' as some have been spelling it, sigh) was released this morning, and it does include the OpenJDK. This is part of a larger effort to have several of Sun's products integrated with Ubuntu, and Roman Stroble wrote about it in 'Java and NetBeans on Ubuntu 8.04'. It's really cool to see it there. Even though we've now had DLJ derived bundles in Ubuntu's Multiverse for 2 yrs now having real honest to goodness open source derived builds is so much better, and is a nice result to get to after the last two years of work since the initial announcement at JavaOne 2006. The goodness doesn't stop there as Fedora is still planning to include OpenJDK derived builds in Fedora 9. And there are some hints other distros are beginning work on OpenJDK builds. Perhaps it will be a tsunami as cgwalters suggested? I just think that with the opportunity now for any open source operating system to pick up the OpenJDK, that Java has a bright future in the open source world.

"??Less Filling??" .. that's modern flotsom that popped into mind as I thought about the encumbrance issues. We are on the cusp of having the binary encumbrances cleared. While the OpenJDK represented a huge chunk of open source code, it was only 95% open source. The remaining bits coming from source we hadn't been able to open source. In the months since we've been working on replacement code or on gaining the rights sufficient to open source those encumbered pieces. And the last of those is on the verge of being resolved.

6u10beta is available.. please test it..!

Recently we made Java SE 6 update 10 available for beta testing. Beta testing is a period in product release cycles where testing is taken to people outside the product team, and those "external" testers bang on it with their applications and let the product team know what's wrong (or not).

There is a lot of exciting stuff in 6u10 (formerly known as 6uN) .. there is a lot more here than the typical update release. Unlike most update releases where the work is limited to critical fixes, for 6u10 the changes are pretty dramatic, will be affecting a lot of things, which leaves us wanting to hear about regressions or other kinds of bugs we may have created along the path of getting to 6u10.

(um.. before the wags get ahold of what I just wrote -- any time you write new code it's common to write some bugs as well)

Let's go over some of the new features:-

Java Deployment Toolkit:- hooboy the description is pretty hairy but says a few interesting things. "allows developers to easily deploy applets and applications to a large variety of clients with JavaScripts.... makes it possible to automatically install Java Platform for Java Plug-in applets and Java Web Start applications. The script exposes a single object, named deployJava" and the deplyJava object has a buncha useful functions to reduce the complexity of deploying an applet across multiple browsers.

The Java Kernel (FAQ) makes for a tiny Java platform which can be more quickly downloaded & installed while still allowing the full Java SE platform to be available, requiring downloads of missing pieces as required.

The next generation Java plugin looks really cool and ought to drastically improve applet and javawebstart functionality and behavior. It is a ground-up reimplementation of the venerable plugin which uses a more intelligent architecture which immediately fixes several outstanding glaring bugs and problems. I think that while in most cases incremental improvements and bug fixes are good, there are times where it's better to just start over from scratch and that this is one of those times.

The most critical part of 6u10 to test is this new plugin.

re: Into the light

I think 'Into the light' is the name of an album by Ian Anderson, who is also the a band that's too old to rock'n'roll and too young to die. Anyway it is also Dalibor's way of announcing something really kewl. I am so tickled to have the opportunity to work with him more closely, so here's a few thoughts ..

In the pre-open source days .. the old days, back when we were arguing it wasn't necessary to open source the Java implementation .. to be honest I thought of Dalibor as a bit of a nuisance. Always asking embarrassing questions and I also thought the name 'Dalibor' had to be one of these made up screen names, and always wondered what his real name was. However over time we made our open source the Java implementation announcement. That made his questions less embarrassing, and I grew to know Dalibor, I learned that's his real name and I learned that he is a really nice guy with what I think of as an amazing approach to manifesting his vision for the world.

Dalibor, welcome to the team. I predict great fun.

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