Farewell To GCJ, Sun Hires GCJ Architect For JavaFX
With Sun releasing OpenJDK into the Free Software community at JavaOne three days ago, the landscape of Free Java will shift.
Stacy Cowley, CRN: One high point of the session came when Red Hat engineer Tom Tromey essentially offered to throw the project he's worked on for nearly a decade, Java compiler GCJ, onto the funeral pyre.
Panelist Dalibor Topic also sees a dimming future for a project he co-maintains called Kaffe, an open-source initiative to build a Java virtual machine (VM).
One panelist took a markedly different view, arguing that the Java community needs rivals to Sun's official implementation. Geir Magnusson, Jr., chair of the Apache Software Foundation's Harmony project, said Harmony still draws participants and plans to stick around.
I wrote an article about GCJ 1591 days (four years) ago. Looking back, I can clearly see that a major role it served is it steered Java toward the direction of Free Software. With the release of OpenJDK, GCJ and GNU Classpath (and other projects) should feel its historical mission fulfilled.
The fate of project Harmony is less certain. From a software ecosystem point of view, the existence of competing implementations tend to keep the technology moving forward. A Free Software license alone will not assure liveliness of OpenJDK. Even the venerable GCC needed a little fork (the egcs project) to push it out of stagnation in the 90's. So Apache Harmony staying around could only be a good thing for Java. And the interim governing board would do better to think long term, to a time when Java may no longer be strategic for Sun. (For example, what are they going to do after Java 7? Add a macro system?)
Incidentally, Per Bothner, who played a part in both the egcs project and the GCJ project, announced on the Kawa (a language implementation toolkit for the JVM, with Scheme and Xquery bytecode compilers, see my article here) mailing list three days ago:
Per Bothner: I'd like to let the Kawa community know that as of a week ago I became a Sun employee. I'll be working 80% time for Sun and 80% on Kawa (well, perhaps a little less). The hire process took a lot longer than expected because of the Kawa IP issues and resolving potential conflicts of interest with my existing Kawa support/consulting business. (No real disagreements; just figuring everything out.)
I'm working on the JavaFX project (which used to called F3), which was just announced this morning. See
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/07/javafx-javaone_1.html
My main task is compiling JavaFX to bytecode. There are obvious Kawa synergies and parallels; in fact I've been hacking together a prototype compiler for JavaFX using Kawa. (That doesn't mean Sun will ship a product using Kawa, though it is not out of the question.) I'll also be working with Chris Oliver and other smart people on language specification.
Google Web Toolkit, JRuby At The JUG
We had one of those days at the St. Louis JUG yesterday. An hour before the meeting, right around the time when folks would leave work for the JUG meeting, it rained really hard.
Once we arrived, we found the auditorium door locked. The building person told us the day user of the auditorium left all their stuff inside, locked the door, so that they can resume their meeting tomorrow. It took the building person fifteen minutes to track down the organizer and convince him to let us in. Of course we have to promise not to touch any of their stuff.
And then, two minutes before the start of the meeting, the fire alarm was triggered. As we have to wait for the fire department to come and issue the all-clear. They came in three minutes. (The fire department is only a couple of blocks away.)
And then Mark Volkmann gave his JRuby talk. Mark have given this talk several times already. I have heard the talk last at the OCI internal Java lunch. One of the interesting points Mark makes is about the readiness of JRuby for a 1.0 release. In several of the slides, Mark points out things that are clearly wrong in JRuby and made the claim that JRuby is not ready for a 1.0 release at JavaOne 2007. Yesterday, Mark was relieved to report that the JRuby team wisely did not release JRuby 1.0 at JavaOne 2007.
The slides are here. You can also get it from Mark's blog.
I forgot to blog about last month's JUG meeting. We had a well attended meeting last month when Brad Busch and Andrew Prunicki talked about the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). What happend was that I took copious notes during the talk, meaning to blog about it the next day. But I was moving some furnitures around and I misplaced the notes. It was the best notes I have taken in any of the JUG meetings, full of funny quotes and witty one-liners. The world will never see them. Sigh. :(
The only quote I can remember now is "I know I'll never do a Struts project again." But all is not lost, the presentation material can be found in the St. Louis JUG Knowledge Base
Talking about the St. Louis JUG Knowledge Base, it is worth noticing that it is exactly ten years ago, in May 1997 that the St. Louis JUG started its life. Take a moment, if you please, to check out the first presentation, also by Mark Volkmann: Java—What's All the Excitement About.
The excitement continues after ten years. And the St. Louis JUG will continue to bring new and exciting contents to the audience. Next month, Tom Wheeler will be talking about the NetBeans Platform. And in July, will be talking about, get this, JavaFX Script.
Yes, after all the "this is not ready" bashing I did yesterday, I still find the JavaFX Script language fascinating, and I'll do my best to get to the bottom of things and report back to you in two months.