Andreas Schaefer's Blog

Sun let's you Scratch the Itch in the JDK 1.6

After complaining about shortcomings in the Java JDK for some time I took the opportunity to actually try to fix one of the problems is encountered and send a patch to Sun. Looking back I have to give kudos to Sun how relatively easy it is to become a contributor and that they really want to keep the developers in the loop not like in the "good old" days where submitting a bug report meant that I just disappeared in a black hole and if you were lucky it reappeared later.

What I would like to see is that there would be a way to access particular classes from the web rather than downloading 65M archive especially when I also need to download a 85M archive containing the binaries. Normally I only need a few classes to work with in order to fix a problem.

So far I am only interested in fixing problems within the Java classes of the JDK and so I do not need to rebuild the entire JDK. In order to run a program with my patches I just prepend the build directory of my patches to the boot classpath like it did to run the JUnit tests within my Ant build script:

<junit printsummary="yes" fork="yes" forkmode="once"
       haltonfailure="no" showoutput="true" 
       failureproperty="test.failures">
       
    <formatter type="xml" usefile="true"/>

    <classpath>
        <path refid="build.test.path"/>
    </classpath>
                        
    <jvmarg value="-Xbootclasspath/p:${my.boot.class.path}"/>
    <jvmarg value="-Xms128m"/>
    <jvmarg value="-Xmx512m"/>			
    <jvmarg value="-Xnoclassgc"/>			
    
    <batchtest todir="${test.report.dir}" >
        <fileset dir="${test.src.dir}" includes="**/*" excludes=""/>
    </batchtest>
</junit>

This is enables me to run the tests without my patch (just by running JDK 1.6 on its won) so make sure that it keeps failing.

Strange how things are changing over time. Back when I was contributing to JBoss there were tensions with Sun about licensing and now I am contributing to the JDK and I have tensions with JBoss about licensing and trademarks.

Have fun - Andy

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