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Gosling on OS Java
Posted by daniel on April 30, 2004 at 09:54 AM | Comments (8)
"If we do something to make Java even more open-source than it is already, having safeguards to protect the developer community will be something we pay a lot of attention to."
In today's Weblogs , James Gosling blogs about Open sourcing Java . He addresses IBM's open letters and their history of contributing to Java. One interesting point is the Swing/SWT/AWT issue. Gosling notes that "IBM was the major mover that led to the creation of the Swing API to replace the AWT api. They contributed many engineers to the Swing team. Viewing that time in hindsight, it is more than slightly ironic that these days they're endorsing SWT, which is essentially a clone of the AWT architecture, which they had strongly condemmed back when the decision to create Swing was being debated."
Every time we have had a conversation about open sourcing Java here on java.net, the feedback has been fairly balanced. There are folks on both sides of the open source issue for whom it is a religious matter. There are others who express their concerns with IBM and others about what could happen to the platform. Gosling summarizes these folks as being "afraid that if Java is open-sourced then someone will try to fragment the community by creating incompatible versions of Java and ignore the community process, just like Microsoft did. Microsoft did a lot of damage to the community and many developers strongly do not want that to happen again." As the quote at the top shows, this is front and center in Sun's mind.
Users who sign up for one flavor of instant messaging still want to be able to chat with friends who have signed up with another. In Anti-Social Software Brendon J. Wilson notes that "
Social networking systems have followed a similar path, coding users into the very same corner[...] Social networking systems are pathologically anti-social on three fronts: their lack of functionality, lack of a web services API, and lack of federation."
Rory Winston questions whether insulating developers from the dataebase layer is always a good idea in O/R Mapping and Performance. He presents three instances of performance impact that developers should be aware of: Improperly configured or non-existant lazy initialization, the inability to use database-specific optimizations, and cache configuration.
Bob Lee posts on the "Default" JDK in IDEA. He tells you how he worked around different JDK names on two different installations.
In
Also in Java Today, JSR 175 introduces metadata to the Java programming language. In "Declarative
Programming in Java" Narayanan Jayaratchagan says that "Every new release of Java has introduced new features, but few warrant a new way of thinking to realize their full potential. Using annotations effectively to simplify programming in Java requires a shift in our thought processes. Even though we use declarative programming languages such as SQL and XSLT most frequently, it may take some time for us to understand how to use declarative and imperative
programming together."
Vikram Goyal moderates the first discussion in our new forum The Programming Profession. He kicks off tips to technical interviewing with an article titled So you don't know what a static inner class is? Think back to your experiences on either side of the interview process and chime in.
In Forums today, John Mitchell asks Architecture? What architecture? He asks "Is it true that the vast majority of systems have no coherent architecture?
Is Brooks' definition of architecture really just another way of talking about end-user usability / interaction design? What about the interface between the different facets and components of the system?"
Is there a mismatch between what your developers can do and what you are asking them to do? rickcarson suggests that the problem may not be one of available skills. In Bargain Developers he writes "about a kid in the US who was failing maths. But when they asked him about baseball, he could rattle off all sorts of university level statistics about it... and the kid is like 8 or 10 yrs old. He's not stupid, its just that he finds maths boring, and baseball interesting". His moral is that "If you want to change the low productivity programmers into high productivity, find what they like and are good at, and get them doing that".
In today's Projects and Communities , the Java Desktop community tip of the week features a site that "points to a bunch of nice web tools for choosing color schemes. [O]ne even shows you how the colors look to people with various kinds of color blindness! "
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Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment
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My Java Concerns
My concerns aren't so much with open sourcing Java. I honestly don't care if Java is open sourced; I have seen good things happen due to open sourcing, and I have seen bad things happen.
My main problem is with some of the atrocious turn around times of bugs in Java. I understand that some bugs are not straightforward to fix because of the impact to forward and backward compatibility, but there have been some (seemingly simple) bugs in core Java (Swing anyone?) which simply do NOT get fixed for years and years.
Now, many bugs DO get fixed every release (thousands), but I think that a lot of the pro-OS Java supporters are probably those who have been burned by 2 year turnaround times on Java releases only to discover their bug is still not fixed, and there is nothing they can do about it. There are many of us.
Recently I talked with some Sun developers about the Compiler API - they told me it wasn't going to make its original release of Java 1.5 (Tiger) simply because there was only 1 developer for that area, and he was too busy with the slew of other changes at the compiler level for generics, enums, etc.
Will open source java fix this? Again, I don't know - I just think people believe that there needs to be a change, and it seems with OSS, where there is a will, there is a way.
Posted by: rjlorimer on April 30, 2004 at 12:30 PM
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What about the little Guy ?
As usual Sun completely misses the real power behind open source the indvidual developer working on open source projects because they want to. Instead Sun considers Open
Source the property of IBM. The reality is the bulk of open source code was developed outside of the confines and control of the large software companies.
IBM may be a powerful entity asking for Sun to bless opensource java development but if you look on SourceForge or GnuClasspath the vast majority of developers are not IBM employees. Sure these developers are not going to play golf with McNeely or cut a check for two billion dollars but they are the heart of the open source movement not IBM and certainly not Microsoft.
Next Sun's called many times for IBM to opensource a key technology well lets see if Sun is willing to give a little bit. Me and many other Java developers intrested in java have signed SCSL licenses. For good reason key opensource java projects such as Gnu Classpath will not allow "tainted" individuals such as myself to work on such projects. Lets see Sun do something as simple as limit the liability of SCSL licensee's contributing to such projects to the licensee not the project.
Can Sun even do such a simple thing are are they just playing word games with IBM. For opensource java to be succesful I only ask that Sun do nothing except get out of the way.
And being a SCSL licensee I assure you that the J2SE crown jewels are not made of gold but simply a gold plated reminder of the hasty development and heady goals of the dot com boom so even if you opensourced java it would be of little use for opensource java development.
Posted by: memmel2 on April 30, 2004 at 07:40 PM
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Just the Java J2ME,J2SE,J2EE Libraries
It would benefit the entire Java based industy, including the free software, open source and proprietary based vendors, to open license the core J2ME,J2SE,J2EE libaries and Java to bytecode compilers.
Java's primary strength, the ability to write code which is constantly portable across many vendors platforms, would be greatly enhanced if all of vendors were using the same core libraries.
To insure that the standard base core would not become polluted with incompatable forks, the source could be licensed with a clause requiring any incompatable changes or any additional classes or methords to be moved to and occupy only the vendors namespace. Another clause would require that the vendor version of Java bytecode compiler and any GUI IDE defaults to generating portable bytecode, without embedding any vendor specific references.
The OSF definition of an open source license clause five explicitly states: "The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software."
Contributions to the core standard would be required to licensed under the same open source license. The existing JCP standard body could decide what becomes part of the Open Java Core. Sun would still retain the veto, and the Java J2ME, J2SE and J2EE brand would be still be protected under trademark law.
It should not be necessary to open source license Sun's JVMs. In the long run it could greatly benefit Sun to develop the JVM under a dual license as it doing with OpenOffice.org and selling StarOffice.
In fact, according to Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's recently appointed president and chief operating officer,
Sun is considing GPL license for Solaris.
Posted by: nzheretic on April 30, 2004 at 08:51 PM
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We're losing precious time. Microsoft's Avalon/XAML platform is comming... Java is popular - but not yet popular / ubiqitous enough to crush any MS threats.
Every time MS comes up with something, the initial reaction is to downplay it - "it has already been done before, it's not secure", etc.... Both IE and Windows were laughable jokes back then (and to some degree now), but you have to remember that most of the world runs on it now.
This technology will not be mind blowingly good, but merely good enough. Yes it is potentially riddled with security holes whose patch process will be years, but It offers enough in the way of new wizzy features and gadgets that most people ignoring security issues as they usually do, it could easily get seriouly hooked on.
XAML is an HTML extension that is intimately tied to proprietary Windows code.
This is MS's newest addictive crack. It has the potential to trap a whole new generation of computers. It is worth being afraid of it.
Unless there is a viable open source alternative to what MS is providing, we stand to get our lunch eaten. Being a Java developer, I don't want my career derailed because there was never an open source alternative to compete with .Net. So far the closest thing is MONO - since Java isn't opening up anytime soon.
Posted by: pulse1014 on May 01, 2004 at 04:51 AM
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There are multipul open source jvm availible today.
-Kaffe
- ORP (Intel)
Or look at : http://joeq.sourceforge.net/other_os_java.htm
Today windows and IE are a nightmare!
A long time ago I read that IE has a File object so the help function in Winows could access files from the HD but also other things that use or run in IE can use the File object and access files on your HD.
People from ms are bad in security stuff.
A little time ago somebody from ms visit my school and told about xbox 2 but also about .net, he said "c# is Java without the bad things", so now I know why bill gates didn't believe in the Internet , ms didn't invent it.
Posted by: carmello on May 01, 2004 at 12:25 PM
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With swixml you can create a GUI with like XAML (which is a XML extension), I don't know if they support code embeded in the files.
You can find swixml at: http://www.swixml.org/
Or else create a project on sourceforge or java.net and create a Java implementation of it.
Posted by: carmello on May 02, 2004 at 06:01 AM
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One problem:
"SwiXml doesn't free the developer from knowing the javax.swing package"
For us, this is easy - think about the MS VB developers, non-Comp Sci new college grads, etc...
Java is not an easy language
Posted by: pulse1014 on May 02, 2004 at 02:09 PM
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Yes, it is true that there are multiple jvms, but all of them are far from being the standard. Most of them don't even have much of a developer mindshare (the most popular one is from IBM) For example, most people including me would never know that Intel even had a jvm.
The other problem you're missing is that these jvms have to have a large install base. Sun's jvm has the largest in terms of jvms, but it is barely found on most client PCs (it's really only on cell phones and other small non-standard arch devices).
.NET doesn't have a large install base since still can't be included in MS OS's at the moment (for legal reasons), as their large developer base transitions to .NET - this will change
Don't let your hatred of MS blind you of the danger.
Have you even tried to develop with .Net? Yes, it is not mature, and no - it isn't secure but do you think most developers will care when the IDE has everything integrated and very easy to use and setup - along with the power of a Java ripoff?
"he said "c# is Java without the bad things""
some of this is actually true - let compare J2EE with .Net.
In J2EE you have to make all kinds of stupid things like EJBs, stubs... in .Net there is no difference between a remote and local object....
XAML is even worse than C#. It is even easier to use. As a Comp Sci trained java developer you probably won't understand this because you have an easy time understanding complex concepts... but think of the Economics or MIS major who becomes a consultant "specilizing" in technology. Guess which tech he'll pick to develop in? He'll choose the technology in which it is the easiest and fastest to return results.
The easiest way for Sun to counter the MS threat is to let Java spread like wildfire on the fastest growing OS in the world. Make Java Open source in terms of licensing. Currenly most Linux distros don't include Java because of licensing and consequently Java doesn't have the popularity that it should have in the Open source community (yes it is popular - but it could be much much bigger - and a lot harder for MS to beat)....
Ideally a free and open Java run by a consortium like Eclipse would be ideal. hopefully McNeally and co changes their minds before it's too late and I have to move on to better things like Novell's MONO. project
Posted by: pulse1014 on May 02, 2004 at 02:28 PM
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