Java To Be Opened For Christmas? 243
MBCook writes "At the Oracle OpenWorld conference, Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced on Wednesday morning that Java would be opened within 30-60 days, which would would mean about Christmas Day at the latest. Sun first announced they would do this back in May at JavaOne but didn't give a date. We've seen rumblings before on this topic. Schwartz also commented on the companies Sun Fire servers, Sun's relationship with Oracle, and general trends."
Re:64-bit (Score:5, Informative)
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/gcjwebplu
[alpha, amd64, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc]
Re:License (Score:5, Informative)
Been there, done that... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Don't get yer hopes up (Score:4, Informative)
Just on a wild guess, since C/C++ doesn't target a VM it'd be like saying "we can get assembler code from C, why can't we get C from assembler code?" Going from byte code is easy (well, not really but...) since eventually the byte code has to run on actual hardware, but I don't think there's any good reverse mapping. In the end, I think you'd end up building a x86 VM inside the Java VM, which would have some terrible overhead.
Re:64-bit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:License (Score:2, Informative)
And HW accelerator licencing ...? ARM, AVR32, etc (Score:5, Informative)
Still wondering if this means they'll be opening up specs on how the ARM Java acceleration works ... it would be nice to have some of those free JVMs able to use that to speed up their
bytecode interpretation.
For those of you who don't know about this, most modern ARM CPUs -- like the ARM-926ejs as found in the Nokia 770 and many cell phones -- include three processor modes: (1) pure 32bit ARM instructions, (2) a 16-bit compressed version of ARM instructions called "Thumb", widely used in microcontrollers, (3) an 8-bit Java bytecode interpreter. The first two have public documentation. But ARM won't give docs to the last out, because Sun won't let them do that; you need a separate licence from Sun to get those documents. So it's fully within Sun's power to open up some widely available Linux-savvy hardware to run Java a lot better ...
There's another CPU that's in the same kind of boat, the new AVR32 from Atmel. You may have noticed that Linux 2.6.19-rc includes initial support for that architecture. AVR32 CPUs have analogues of (1) and (3) above ... but again, Atmel won't give docs to
the Java acceleration out, because Sun won't let them do that.
(And for background info: yes AVR32 is very new, likely its audience today is almost
all developers, only one model of chip available so far.)
So how about it, Sun ... are you really going to open Java up??
Re:64-bit (Score:1, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:64-bit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:umm yeah ... who cares (Score:3, Informative)
solaris was never a big player on anything other than (expensive) sun hardware and even there linux was creeping in.
sun java is the primary implementation of java. That is it is what everyone writes there code to work with and what you expect to find if you purchase java hosting.
as to the license terms iirc the CDDL is a mozilla like license, incompatible with the GPL (but then so is nearly every copyleft license other than the GPL itself). Opensourcing the real thing will remove most of the motivation to develop clones (afaict the main motivation for developing the clones has been to get java into linux distros etc).
Re:I'll believe it when I see it. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:CDDL? I don't think so... (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting. The Open Source Initiative disagree with you [opensource.org], and the Free Software Foundation describe it as a GPL-Incompatible, Free Software License [fsf.org]. Sounds pretty open to me. Oh, and I actually have read the license; I suggest you do to.
Re:I'll believe it when I see it. (Score:3, Informative)
OpenOffice,
OpenSolaris,
NFS,
Netbeans,
GlassFish
etc etc
Sun also contributes to Gnome, X.org, PostGreSQL, Mozilla and many other projects.
Get a fucking clue and stop spreading the same old FUD.
Re:So in other words (Score:4, Informative)
Re:64-bit (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So in other words (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Co-ffeee... (Score:5, Informative)
I'll do a test right now, with Java 1.6b2 and Eclipse 3.2 with an Athlon 64: 12 seconds to the workbench.
Yep, that's a long time. Keep in mind Eclipse is a heavy app and I do have many extensions installed. Other Java apps I use regularly, such as pdftk (command line) come up instantly and work very fast.
Properly written Java apps are not slow, though if they use Swing they look hideous.
Re:OT, funny sig? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:64-bit (Score:2, Informative)
Ah, you kids today and your multi-threads GUI programs.
It's entirely possible - indeed, was once common - to use an event loop/callback scheme to run a GUI program in a single thread. Obviously non-blocking calls must be used.
Threading only started to become common with the release of Pthreads, in the mid-1990s. (Of course it existed long before then!) I don't do much GUI programming but I would not be surprised if back in the days of X11R4, the X libraries weren't even thread-safe.