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Google Flavored Java?

(Via Miguel de Icaza)

Stefano Mazzocchi: Today Google released the Android code and I took a serious look at its internals... and found the solution for the licensing problem. It's called Dalvik and it's the new name of Sun's worst nightmares.

Dalvik is a virtual machine, just like Java's or .NET's.. but it's Google's own and they're making it open source without having to ask permission to anyone (well, for now, in the future expect a shit-load of IP-related lawsuits on this, especially since Sun and Microsoft signed a cross-IP licensing agreement on exactly such virtual machines technologies years ago... but don't forget IBM who has been writing emulation code for mainframes since the beginning of time).

But Android's programs are written in Java, using Java-oriented IDEs (it also comes with an Eclipse plugin)... it just doesn't compile the java code into java bytecode but (ops, Sun didn't see this one coming) into Dalvik bytecode.

So, Android uses the syntax of the Java platform (the Java "language", if you wish, which is enough to make java programmers feel at home and IDEs to support the editing smoothly) and the java SE class library but not the Java bytecode or the Java virtual machine to execute it on the phone (and, note, Android's implementation of the Java SE class library is, indeed, Apache Harmony's!)

I haven't looked inside Android, but I trust Stefano's description. And I believe we are seeing fruits of The Third Fork From Sun that I outlines 215 days ago.

[Update]: Wow. This thing (the emulator) works!

And it advertises itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 0.5; en-us) AppleWebKit/522+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on November 13, 2007 12:57:01 PM CST #


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Re: Google Flavored Java?

Comment from Dan Lewis on November 14, 2007 7:30:27 AM CST #
Quick, somebody find me a pitchfork! We can't let Microsoft, err, wait, I mean Google get away with this. Does this remind anyone of the Microsoft VM for Java?
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Re: Google Flavored Java?

Comment from Weiqi Gao on November 14, 2007 7:36:51 AM CST #

Here you go:

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Re: Google Flavored Java?

Comment from Shane Isbell on November 14, 2007 12:01:32 PM CST #
This doesn't remind me of Microsoft's JVM, but rather resembles Palm's conversion of jars to PRC.
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Re: Google Flavored Java?

Comment from Dario Laverde on November 14, 2007 12:38:46 PM CST #
Pitchfork, the Spring add-on to enable JEE 5? Oh, you mean that pitchfork. Frankly I don't know what the commotion is. Recall that Microsoft's VM was a better VM and that it was the legal squabbles coming from Sun that killed having Java available by default on every desktop (so what if it had extra features - it still followed a standard) and I delivered apps to it until the end of it's lifetime. Now (a bit too late I'm afraid) Sun gets the message (thanks to Flash) and is trying to rush a "Consumer VM" out in 2008... Good for Google, especially for using an Apache 2.0 license (yes I have yet to investigate thoroughly to see if all the source for everything is there and under Apache license so we'll see...) As I've said before: fork and fork often (if necessary).
Reply

Re: Google Flavored Java?

Comment from Anonymous on June 25, 2008 9:06:20 AM CDT #
The Microsoft VM didn't follow the standard. That was the problem. For instance, it didn't include RMI and JNI, and they added replacements for these features that made the resulting apps impossible to run across platforms. So, Sun had every right to sue, and they won for just that reason (MS had to pay a billions of dollars to Sun as compensation).

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