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Then there will be enough libre programmers to make decent libre IDEs etc, and the proprietary Java will wither away (and Sun with it).

In case you're not aware of it, there's a pretty good libre IDE named Eclipse available. So... can you explain to me exactly why a libre implementation of Java would require development of an entirely new IDE?

Now, changes in the Java specification might require changes in an IDE - but that would apply to both proprietary and libre IDEs equally. Just changing the license that the Java source code is under won't immediately invalidate the value and existance of the current crop of Java IDEs.

And you wonder why you're having trouble finding GPL programmers for it? :)

You might have better luck trying to sell the same idea to the Palm community. Not only do you already have a bunch of "anything-but-Microsoft" folks, but even the new development tools are based on the Eclipse open-source IDE. There are FAR more apps and developers out for Palm, many of them free.

Well, the best Java IDE is already free (in all senses).

You're almost right.

Not "any monkey" can write a VM. They're non-trivial (just ask the Kaffe folks), and IBM has several irons in the fire. As well as licensing Sun's VM (and improving it vastly for their customers) they also have their own VM under development, entirely free of Sun IP.

On the issue of class libraries, you're also nearly right. Swing would be hard work, and pointless. There's a reason that eclipse doesn't use Swing... IBM isn't interested in it - it sucks.

IBM also has their own set of class libraries under development - entirely free of Sun IP.

So, in my opinion, this is just a huge red herring. IBM has enough projects under heavy development to release a completely open-source VM and set of class libraries within 18 months if they want to.

Personally, I think it's going to happen, and this is them tapping on Sun's window going "if you don't do it, we will, and we'll do it without using your IP".

IBM put JFS the AIX journaling filesystem into Linux. They might well respond by saying yes. I do admit that given IBMs long history of tweaking SUN (Eclipse anyone?) that this offer by IBM might not be taken that well. OTOH Sun has never seemed that hell bent on monetizing Java - the licensing and conformance testing fees probably don't begin to cover development costs.

They say are trying to build a community around Java and it seems to me that given those two points Sun really should release Java to the open source community.

I think this really would give Java a HUGE boost over .NOT.

Besides, JBoss and Linux distros make money on packaging and supporting Free but hugely complex systems.

So, how far does Linux have to come to match these tools?

Considering that they are thinking about moving to an Eclipse/CDT-based IDE, hopefully Linux won't really have to do much of anything.

Eclipse and CDT already run on Java, atop GDB. It's just up to WRS to port whatever OS-aware bits they want to the new Eclipse/CDT architecture, and to make sure that there is a working GDB that can target their hardware.

I am willing to bet that this new Linux strategy is most of the reason they've been toying with the move to Eclipse/CDT in the first place...


Mechanik

Is this why IBM have never had anything to do with Java?

Nothing what so ever.

ESR, once more, is publicity-whoring on a subject he either knows nothing about, or chooses to be deliberately ignorant of. Any brief perusal of the Java scene will uncover an enormous amount of Open Source work going on, some of it very high quality. (And much less so, of course, but that's the same all over).

What ESR really means is that there's a lack of adoption of Java from Unix/C programmers. This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Java is Open Source or not, and everything to do with the perception amongst such programmers (whether deserved or not), of the Java language itself. People don't choose Perl, Python or Ruby over Java because the former are open source. People choose them because they prefer using the scripting languages.

I have this feeling that Scott McNealy isn't sitting there thinking "Damn, I guess if we totally cede control over this language, all those Unix nerds who hate Java anyway are going to drop their copies of Python and come rushing to embrace us!"

Charles Miller

.NET performs *MUCH* better than Java.

You may want to check this out. Java beats .Net in all categories except trig calculations.

Sadly, the cross-platform promise of Java, especially for GUI desktop applications, was never realized.

Since you admitted you're a former C++ and now a .Net developer, I don't think you're qualified to make this statement. I've developed Java apps for 6 years and I haven't seen any cross-platform problems for at least the last 5 years. I'll agree with you that Swing sucks, but SWT or wx4j gives you native look & feel and native performance and cross-platformedness. So I think that even if you are developing a client side app, there is no reason not to use Java. Why lose the 10% or so Linux/Mac users when Java is just as good as .Net for client side development?

Eclipse

IBM has been much nicer with Eclipse. And You can now combine that, with GNU Classpath and IKVM.NET to bring you Java Eclipse on Mono .NET!. Be free to mix and match the best of two languages. With Free Software you are free to do what some coorporations would never want to happen. Even if it is the best for developers and users!

Amazing! And of course you can just use java as a as a normal language with GCC (gcj). We even have native eclipse! Super fast, no slow bytecode interpreter needed.

Go away Sun with you proprietary closed non-free java! We don't need you anymore.

So, whatever the motivation of Mono or dotGnu, I simply want to develop my cross-platform C# apps. That's MY motivation, and that's what matters to me.

As for Java. I used to agree about the ugly user interface. That is until I tried Eclipse. Eclipse uses SWT which is a GUI kit for Java that uses native libraries. So under MS Windows, your Java apps look and fell just like any other Win32 application. Under Linux SWT uses GTK+2 so they look and feel is like a native Linux application. I personally think SWT is very nice. Here are some screenshots of The Azureus BitTorrent client. This client is written in Java and looks and acts like a normal Win32 app instead of an ugly Java swing app. It looks and acts the same under Linux as well.

Try Google (the second link)

Also, there's quite a bit of documentation on the SWT project page (available from the homepage projects->The Eclipse Project->Platform->SWT)

I've yet to find online javadoc for the 3.0 version since they haven't had an official release yet and they only have it for official releases, not the milestones. If you want that, download SWT and run javadoc manually.

Swing is pretty slow, and I don't see sun promoting any of the alternatives yet.

You need SWT. But I don't think you'll see sun promoting it:)

Very far into the future then, since currently there exists only a single real application that uses SWT.

It doesn't matter. You buy a Mac if you like Macs. I personally enjoy using Mac OS X far more than using Windows. Everyone I know who uses Macs love Macs. Nobody I know who uses PCs love PCs, they just tolerate them. But you need to decide for yourself.

Now, you asked about Java performance on the Mac. It's fine. I recently switched from doing Java development on a PC to a Mac, and the Mac was faster. It was a faster machine (a dual 1.25 GHz G4 vs a single 1.6 GHz Athlon), so what this proves is that the Java performance on the Mac isn't totally horrible (otherwise the faster machine would have been slower at Java).

One thing to consider is that Apple, not Sun, is in charge of making the JVM. Apple is always a bit behind. They just recently released 1.4.2, for example.

And I would disagree with the people who recommend XCode. It's a nice IDE, but if you're doing pure Java, then you're better off using a smart IDE like IDEA or Eclipse that can do refactoring and smart code completion. IDEA and Eclipse both run fine on the Mac, though they look and feel a bit weird (IDEA has been getting much better recently; check out the version 4.0 release candidate instead of the currently-shipping 3.0 release).

Finally, if you do decide to get the Mac, and you've never bought a Mac before, here are some tips: Apple (like all manufacturers) charges a lot for extras so you might want to consider buying extra RAM elsewhere, and fixing a Mac can be expensive so I would recommend Apple's extended warranty, especially on a laptop.

XCode can handle Java apps, but a lot of the sexy new features, like command completion (called Code Sense (tm)), aren't supported. I ended up bagging XCode and going back to Eclipse 2.1.2. Eclipse, which used to be a huge pain in the ass to get working on OS X is a quick install and doesn't run as slow as in days past. I haven't compiled any huge Java apps, so my opinion is biased, but my apps compile in a reasonable amount of time.

I have a TiBook, 667 MHz, 512MB RAM.

I know I'm repeating myself (I mentioned this on the other comment in this subthread) but there's a good article on the Eclipse site about the SWT resource management philosophy.

Another difference you can't ignore is that SWT has been widely ported. With Motif, GTK2, Carbon, Photon, and Win32 ports, SWT runs on more platforms than Sun's own JRE.

As a result, it's easy to view SWT as a real contribution to Java, in the language's original spirit.

Is there any reason GIVEN for this? Or is Java reinventing the wheel yet again, only to discover a way to wrap native widgets, and let the GC manage their death....

This article explains their reasoning pretty well. Short summary: GC finalization doesn't guarantee order, while the order of disposal is important to the OS. You can write extra code to try and order the disposal, but in the end that's difficult, tedious and error prone and slows down the code considerably.

Then again, if enough slashdotters registered on Eclipse's bugzilla and voted for that bug to be fixed ...

Then again, if enough slashdotters registered on Eclipse's bugzilla and voted for that bug to be fixed ...

Then again, if enough slashdotters registered on Eclipse's bugzilla and voted for that bug to be fixed ...

What are you talking about? Could you please substantiate your claim with specific examples?

I'm not the original poster, but I'll take a stab at a quick example since I agree that Eclipse is unintuitive. Why do I have to double-click an editor's window decoration to make the side panel where the component tree is stored visible? In fact, to me, Eclipse has so many crappy little windows that it is painful to figure out what they contain and how to navigate between them and how to find them again when I inadvertantly make one of them go away.

Have you considered that maybe you were doing something wrong? What about Eclipse-- it looks pretty much the same (and correct) to me in both GNOME and Windows.

And if a widget doesn't exist on a particular platform, you are screwed. Try printing from Eclipse on GTK/Linux:

Bug 24796 If GTK doesn't not have support for printing we are afraid that there will be no print support for SWT-GTK port. But Unix printing does not work the way it does on Windows. Dialog boxes are not required since Unix generally uses lpr with pipes to various filters. So here we have a case of the IDE developers refusing to implement a required feature in their IDE because they believe that the underlying platform (GTK) should conform to them rather than the other way around.

But then I've never understood what an IDE offers that isn't trivial to do using emacs, a shell, make, and a debugger. Maybe, an IDE with a form layout tool is useful and I haven't tried any of the Eclipse offerings in this area. I was quite disappointed with the Omando (sp?) UML tool. It crashed my Eclipse more often than not whenever I tried to use it.

Which points up another problem with Eclipse. I predict that it will descend into dll (jar) hell sometime soon. Each plugin will insist upon certain versions of jars and each tool vendor will screw up some other vendor by installing some common jar whose version is incompatible with the other tool's needs.

That's so true. Very few people tries IDEA and goes back to somehting else. None of the Eclipse users I know has ever used IDEA. if they had, they'd be IDEA users now. :-)

SWT is a set of graphical tools that allow you to code once, but run on any OS

That's not strictly true. The GUI widgits in SWT are provided by a shared library compiled for the local platform and linked to Java code with JNI.

This means you need a shared library compiled and tested for your platform. To see what platforms are currently supported and the status of those platforms, check out the port status section of the eclipse homepage.
My impression of SWT is it's more feature rich than AWT, faster and nicer looking than Swing, but the downside is it won't necessarily run on any platform that supports Java.

I am too. I've been using using Eclipse for a while now and its fantastic for applet development. Sun's Netbeans/Forte/WhateverItsCalledThisMonth was an absolute pain to setup. Eclipse is just a double-click away.

I hope this squabble starts pushing the team a little, as numerous others and I, have been waiting on a "Folding" implementation for a very long time.

In the end, you, as a developer need to figure out what tool you want to use. I think it's great there are so many choices. On the project I'm working with all but one are using IDEA and the last one uses Eclipse. We have no problems at all interoperating. We all use the same source, and the same Apache Ant scripts. So why should we care about this?

In the end, you, as a developer need to figure out what tool you want to use. I think it's great there are so many choices. On the project I'm working with all but one are using IDEA and the last one uses Eclipse. We have no problems at all interoperating. We all use the same source, and the same Apache Ant scripts. So why should we care about this?

Yep, J2EE is ridiculously expensive. I mean, just check out these figures...

JBoss Appserver - Cost: $0.00
IBM 1.4 JDK for Linux x86 - Cost: $0.00
Eclipse IDE - Cost: $0.00

Java is case sensitive and I don't mind. But if it bothers your, try Eclipse; it should help you a great deal.

Eclipse is a free IDE from IBM.

Ooops... Should have previewed...

Here's the link to Eclipse.

Don't buy too heavily into the "fast" of SWT. It's not fast at all on MacOSX. However, it is blazing fast on Windows. But then again, there are some blazing fast Swing apps on Windows too.

At work, on my Win2k machine, I use WebSphere Studio Application Developer (which is basically just Eclipse with a bunch of extensions from IBM). WSAD/Eclipse is a SWT application, and its performance is excellent. Yes, you can tell it's not written with MFC, but it's very very fast. But I also use jEdit (for stuff like Python or PL/SQL), and it's just as fast, if not faster sometimes. And that's written in Swing.

...well, actually an acronym - SWT.

Obviously, anyone who jumps to this conclusion has NEVER ran the Eclipse IDE before.

I like Eclipse, don't get me wrong, but ANY editor that keeps the CPU running at around a 70% load while just editing a file or 2 is just plain wrong.

Well there already doing the native Java IDE for Linux (and Windows) and doing quite well too.

http://eclipse.org/

This piece ignores the obvious and large contributions that some companies have made in money, programmer time, code release and even just lending their name and credibility to projects like KDE and GNOME

Ok, so now that Java is on the retreat they try to enter a new area?

It's probably because there's no Java user community or usefull implementations out there. And it has virtually no practical application on the desktop for that matter. Maybe because it doesn't do 3D or sound. Or is not so usefull as far as scalable RDBMS abstraction or a real application server for the enterprise. Maybe they need to move into the mobile market. What's really needed is a good Java IDE to get developers on board. Changes should be driven by the software community and making the source open would help as well. Sun should also be making improvments in Java's next(?) version.

You're right, I guess "we" should just cut our losses.

It depends on where you put the apices:

Open "Source Engineering" Software? Here
"Open Source" "Engineering Software"? Here
"Open Source Engineering" Software? Here

Hope I've been of help but I doubt it! :-D

Oh look, these people are patently under 14</sarcasm>

That in under a minutes googling. Now crawl back under a rock troll.

And for people who STILL believe that Java is slow, download eclipse (the url is above, for those of you can't google for it, or even guess it) and have a play...it's written in Java and *GASP* is not only a)amazingly useful, but b)damn snappy, seriously, those people who said Java would never work on the desktop because its too slow, they can start eating their hats.

Plus, I just did a job search for c++ vs. Java on a uk job site and guess what, the number of results returned was nearly identical, so by the look of things, lots of people and companies use Java. IMHO, for enterprise n-tiered applications its the shiznitz.

The reason that Java can be faster is because you can do some really nifty optimisations during runtime with the latest JIT compilers that are impossible (or at least monumentally difficult) to do with compile c/c++ code.

In closing: Here is another benchmark...maybe because he has a domain name you'll trust him more?

The current version of Java code cannot be distinguished from natively compiled code. (At least on a 2 GHz P4.) You don't have to take my word for it. Download Eclipse and see for yourself. BTW Eclipse is written in Java.

As for Java working with limited processing power, you have to remember that there is a Java Micro Edition available for embedded devices.

Agreed that SWT is a great toolkit but VEP (which is the visual editor you mention I think) doesn't do SWT yet. For the moment it's Swing/AWT only.
However it's on their roadmap to add SWT support.

Check here.

There is also now a visual editor which should make development much easier.

Check it out at http://www.eclipse.org

Oz

Don't know if this was meant to be a joke, but I had to do a double take myself when I saw that mentioned on the page. The CDE mentioned is not the "Common Desktop Environment" many of us may think of, in this case it stands for "Common Data Editor."

Eclipse has a project geared towards development and deployment of cobol applications on MS, Linux and Solaris.
Too bad it has gotten virtually no publicity; I'd like to have seen it declared before Microsoft's, and show that they're not the only "innovators" in town...

Heard those suckers will repeat it again on a bigger scale for .au and .nz later in the month.

economy will not gain any boost

Please attempt to calculate the value-add of a product such as Eclipse. IBM handed that to the world for free. They did this because IBM is a smart, well run company that knows how to make itself valuable in the marketplace. Eventually they'll save a big wad of cash when they stop paying inflated prices for proprietary PBX hardware and maintenance, and in a small way that will eventually contribute to the next moral equivalent of Eclipse.

Linux advocacy, giving AMD Opteron a huge credibility boost, one of the best JVM implementations, a world class IDE for free... You geeks need to show IBM some love. They are one of the good guys.

He doesn't even get that IBM and sun back OSS projects to some extent.
Back like in producing lots of free software?
Did OSS start as a "pet project"? Maybe. But now, for many, is just a tool to make money. A lot of of money. The fact that the community is also beneffited is "collateral damage" for them.

I for one, do NOT want any U.S. Company taking over SuSE (or any non-U.S. controlled distro).

IBM has some Linux and open-source work going on in Europe, so it could be natural for them to use a European company as their Linux vehicle. For example, Linux for the /370 (well, whatever they call it now) originated at IBM Germany, and their OTI company develops the open-source Eclipse development environment in Zurich.

Also, in 2000 IBM announced investments of the order of $300M into Linux in Europe, and I would not be surprised if part of that went to SuSE. In fact, maybe this is one reason (except for the obvious ones) that SuSE is not yet going public - they probably have enough money. The IBM/SuSe hardware/software association plays extremely well here. In fact, whenever I hear Linux here, IBM and SuSE seem to pop up.

If SuSE went public, I would be in. And we all remember Digital Research and what difference IBM can make to an OS company...

Of course, Microsoft can't buy out IBM. On the other side, after cashing in lots of government subsidies for developing an independent German IT industry, Siemens sold its computer business to Fujitsu, so I do not see any reason why a non-US company should put up more resistance to Microsoft.