Andreas Schaefer's Blog

JDK Community: Update

After quite some screaming and kicking (see my previous blog) my fix for bug ##6212146 made it into Mustang build #78. For a change I do not want to bitch about anything but congratulate Sun for all the progress they made in the Peabody endeavor. Any community project in a big company is difficult especially when so much is at stack as in Java and lawyers tend to be the problem as well as the solution and so it is amazing that the community project went as far as it did. Of course, there is a lot that can be improved and I will try to contribute to that as much as I can but I think that Sun is on the right path and I see the light at the end of the tunnel where Java becomes an open-source project.

Nearly ten years ago I had an job interview in my hometown in Switzerland and the manager  asked me what I would like to do as a software engineer if the sky would be the limit. According to his reaction he was not used to hear that a little developer would like to write software that is distributed worldwide. Since I moved to the US this dream became more and more reality and now some code will be distributed along with JDK 1.6. Now, the only thing left to do is world domination, right Pinky.

Bad Andy - Better Pizza

Comments

• glad to see you in the collab forum Andy. Im looking forward to seeing you create a 'disconnect' method.

  leouser

  Posted by: leouser on April 05, 2006 at 03:59 PM

• Sun's Java implementation won't become open source for a long time to come. See http://www.advogato.org/person/robilad/diary.html?start=86

  As long Sun can sqeeze licensing revenue out of it, you will have to pry the source code out of McNealy's hands to get it under an open source license. No way Sun would ever hand the mobile market to their competitors on a silver platter, as long as they are the only show in town.

  cheers,
  dalibor topic

  Posted by: robilad on April 05, 2006 at 06:00 PM

• I agree with you, dalibor, patching the SUN JDK is a short answer
  a real free JDK is better but it's really pleasant to have the
  hability to patch the most used JDK.

  I currently write a parser generator that heavily used enums,
  perfs was not what we expect due to a bug in the Sun jdk,
  so i patch it (see #6276988).

  Perhaps more interresting, you can implement RFE and then
  change the shape of the Java API. (#5005831)

  Rémi Forax

  Posted by: forax on April 06, 2006 at 03:08 AM

• @forax

  wow, I didn't even know you wrote that. How big of a boost in performance did you see?

  leouser

  Posted by: leouser on April 06, 2006 at 12:39 PM

• @leouser,
  I've sent the patch before the forum was created :)

  The patch avoid to clone the array of enum values
  when an EnumSet is created.
  In my case, because the generated parser only use EnumSet,
  the performance boost that over 30%.

  Remi Forax
  

  Posted by: forax on April 07, 2006 at 12:48 AM

• You'll have to take back the "needless to say" quote about me. :)

  Posted by: ingenthr on June 12, 2006 at 11:20 PM

• Sorry, that was not ment this way. I wanted to say that I did not hear from the JDK community and not from you.

  -Andy

  Posted by: schaefa on June 12, 2006 at 11:53 PM

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