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18. Does the JRL prevent me from being able to create an independent open source implementation of the licensed technology?

The JRL is not a tainting license and includes an express "residual knowledge" clause which says you're not contaminated by things you happen to remember after examining the licensed technology. The JRL allows you to use the source code for the purpose of JRL-related activities but does not prohibit you from working on an independent implementation of the technology afterwards. Obviously, if your intention is to create an ÒindependentÓ implementation of the technology then it is inappropriate to actively study JRL source while working on such an implementation. It is appropriate, however, to allow some decent interval of time (e.g. two weeks) to elapse between working on a project that involves looking at some JRL source code and working on a project that involves creating an independent implementation of the same technology.

B. Residual Rights. If You examine the Technology after accepting
this License and remember anything about it later, You are not
"tainted" in a way that would prevent You from creating or
contributing to an independent implementation, but this License grants
You no rights to Sun's copyrights or patents for use in such an
implementation.

18. Does the JRL prevent me from being able to create an independent open source implementation of the licensed technology?

The JRL is not a tainting license and includes an express "residual knowledge" clause which says you're not contaminated by things you happen to remember after examining the licensed technology. The JRL allows you to use the source code for the purpose of JRL-related activities but does not prohibit you from working on an independent implementation of the technology afterwards. Obviously, if your intention is to create an ÒindependentÓ implementation of the technology then it is inappropriate to actively study JRL source while working on such an implementation. It is appropriate, however, to allow some decent interval of time (e.g. two weeks) to elapse between working on a project that involves looking at some JRL source code and working on a project that involves creating an independent implementation of the same technology.

B. Residual Rights. If You examine the Technology after accepting
this License and remember anything about it later, You are not
"tainted" in a way that would prevent You from creating or
contributing to an independent implementation, but this License grants
You no rights to Sun's copyrights or patents for use in such an
implementation.

You can't write Ruby on Rails in Java? Oh. Best tell these guys: https://trails.dev.java.net/ Enterprise developers deal with inadequacies in Java by doing what everyone else does: Writing their way around it. This is where struts, hibernate, ant, junit came from.

I'm sure the Trails guys will be the first to admit that Trails (like peers RIFE, Sails, and Stripes) is not as simple as Rails is. We Java developers are used to looking past the 30 lines of getter/setter boilerplate and other mysterious Java incantations. But that's not true for a lot of devs.

Both Struts and Hibernate prove my point in different ways. Struts gets around Java's limitations with reams of XML, a cure frequently worse than the disease. Hibernate is closer to the spirit of RoR, but that's not really Java either; they have to do heavy wizardry with bytecode manipulation and dynamic subclassing because Java doesn't give them the necessary power. And note that Hibernate came from outside Sun. Sun's attempt at the same the same thing was EJB, which has been deservedly, if belatedly, shot in the head.

As a senior technical person in a large enterprise I too seek the holy grail of letting business people enter their business processes into a pretty front-end and getting a fully featured website with full supply chain integration automatically generated.

Actually, that's not what I seek at all. I believe that software development is inherently complex; you can't ever automate the thinking away. What you can do is give the developer tools to aid their productivity, to make simple things easy and dangerous things hard. Let them focus their brainpower on the things that are actually worthy tasks.

For a data driven system, it's great. For a complex system integrating with multiple other systems, it's no easier to use.

Exactly. At the low end, it's easier; at the high end, it's the same (or perhaps a little worse). But what Sun is missing is the idea that development need not always be hard. Pehaps they'll learn that from Hibernate, which comes from an attitude very like RoR. If not, I hope they learn it from Rails.

And because it does so much magic under the skin, if that magic doesn't meet your needs, you struggle more to change it.

I agree completely. This is where I'm waiting to see how the RoR and Ruby communities mature. They've got the entry-level system taken care of, but can they provide a path to complex systems without the kinds of complexity cliffs that you see amateurs using Access or VB run smack into? I think that Ruby the language has horsepower that other easy-to-use tools don't, but we'll see if they can turn that potential into actual results.

You can't write Ruby on Rails in Java? Oh. Best tell these guys: https://trails.dev.java.net/

Enterprise developers deal with inadequacies in Java by doing what everyone else does: Writing their way around it. This is where struts, hibernate, ant, junit came from. Most enterprise shops use open source code extensively, in addition to the core language.

This doesn't make the language bad.

As a senior technical person in a large enterprise I too seek the holy grail of letting business people enter their business processes into a pretty front-end and getting a fully featured website with full supply chain integration automatically generated.

I also know that this just isn't yet possible. There have been many advances towards this, and certainly developer productivity has risen massively even in the last few years.

Does Ruby on Rails help? No. For a data driven system, it's great. For a complex system integrating with multiple other systems, it's no easier to use. And because it does so much magic under the skin, if that magic doesn't meet your needs, you struggle more to change it.

Java is not the answer. But I can happily recommend its use for server-side development, along with PHP or .NET or even Ruby, according to the situation, the skillsets, the other factors involved.

2. JVM is fat fat fat, it uses way more RAM than is reasonable.

1) You do know that tools such as top and ps report a lot more memory than is really used? This has been adressed in the upcoming Java 6, which will more accurately report the memory used, you will likely see a decrease of 25-55% reported memory use on Linux/Unix, and at least 11% of real memory used.
2) You can use jvm startup parameters to limit memory usage and still get acceptable performance.

As the two ACs who have been modded out of view said, that particular drug already exists - Jython - and is already supported in Java IDEs like NetBeans (via Coyote) and Eclipse. It's been interesting to see all the old urban myths about the Java platform being slow, bloated, single language and so on doing the rounds again though, I'd almost forgotten about them...

As it happens there are many projects (200+) to make a variety of languages run on the various implementations of the Java VM. Even Sun supports Jython and Groovy in addition to the Java language. Turns out this was another idea Microsoft copied.

I absolutely agree that having conformant java specifications is a great thing, and is perhaps the single most important reason for Java's success.

They have already open sourced J2EE (without the J2SE portion) in the form of Glassfish.

New definition of 'open source', accidental leak, or does the person not have a clue what they are talking about?

None of the above. It was a simple typo, the PR folks missed out the "EE" from "Java EE", it was referring to Glassfish, and becuase of the confidential nature of the release it did not get the usual proof-reading by geeks. I'e asked for it to be fixed.

If you are interested in JVM languages, you might as well look at Pnuts. It runs roughly as fast as Lua.

It'll be a cold day in hell before Sun releases the source code to any software that people actually use.

You mean like source to the jdk, j2ee, and various reference implementations?

For Java, how about you just compile Mustang J2SE 1.6 from source? I don't see any problems in doing that (other than the fact that compiling Mustang is non-trivial in some cases for some reason).

Where can i see the source-code of the java-compiler? how do i know it does not contain any malevolent features? how can i improve it if it has a problem? how can i add a feature or change it if a friend asks for my help?
because i want to know what my computer does, i am not free to download the jre. to do so would be to give up a part of the control over my computer.
howie.

You can download and change the source for the next version of Java from here:
https://mustang.dev.java.net/

This link has quite a bit of information - check it out. -Eric

https://lg3d-core.dev.java.net/ This glass is pretty cool

Here's one blog where dozens of people have posted their complaints with Swing - they say it better than I could:

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joshy/archive/2005/03 /why_dont_you_sh.html

Sorry, the RS dude read the wrong price, it's on sale for $50 but I didn't get one because he said $100 at the time. Good thing, because I found some info that lets you do the same thing with a little work. The interface is a TTL level RS-232 port, and you can get RS-232 to TTL level using a transistor and / or a TL082 op-amp. Just remember it's low level current so you can use resistors, diodes, and most PCs pick up ground as a (-) on the RS-232 port so no reason to go through all the trouble of making negative voltages. Why do people always do overkill on stuff like this? It's a simple inverter and only two signals to deal with! You can even get power directly from the RS-232 end if you like. You can trick the negative voltage if you have to by offsetting the (+) input of the op-amp or other such tricks you should know by now anyway.

"Vex is a pic controller. It is programmed in C using either Intelitek EasyC or Microchip MPLab, Cbot compiler, and IFI loader." "Computing power for the Micro Controller comes from two Microchip PIC18F8520 CPUs--CMOS processors that fly through instructions at a whopping 10 MIPS apiece and have 32K of program memory. The PIC18 contains a built-in A/D converters, a handful of digital input and interrupt lines, and an RS-232/RS-485 USART for serial"

https://jvex-robotics.dev.java.net/ToolChainSetup. html
http://www.vexlabs.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=9

Here is pinout for the RX1 or RX2 ports:
Pin 1 - Power +5 volts (the right most pin when looking at the front connector)
Pin 2 - Receiver
Pin 3 - Gnd
Pin 4 - Tether Detect (the left most pin when looking at the front connector)

RX1 and RX2 are inputs to the Master processor and can not be changed.

"The TX and RX data pins are on the inside by the marking. Closest to the TX label is data. The center pin is +5V and ground is the outside pin closest to the edge of the Vex Controller. This pattern is true for all the pins in the connector.

There are 2 Serial Ports on the User processor. One is connected to the Serial Port and the other one is connected to the RX and TX on the Analog/Digital connector. Both these Serial Ports are TTL levels and not RS232. Do not connect RS232 devices to these Serial Ports without level converters or damage may occur. There is no I2C bus available."

Slow, unusable in real work environments, but real. Check https://lg3d.dev.java.net/, "there be download links there".

Last time I tried it (about 6 months ago) I was actually able to use it for a couple of hours without hanging :)

I agree about the Acid2 stuff, but Project Looking Glass is far from vaporware. It hasn't had a final release yet and hasn't gotten much press of late, but considering that if you go here: https://lg3d-core.dev.java.net/, you can get nightly builds with instructions for Linux, Solaris and Windows installations, and that I was running these builds over a year ago, it's definitely an actual product. v0.7.1 is the latest stable build.

A lot of companies and open source projects seem to have a focus now on making things faster and using less resources recently, which I think is great news. I just updated Suse 10.0 on my laptop to a new KDE and Qt version (3.5 and 3 repectively, I believe), and things are really faster and more responsive now. I'm eager to download the Gnome live CD too and test.

Java 1.5 and upcoming 1.6 have improved startup speeds, GUI rendering (single threaded Open GL) and cut down on real and precieved memory usage too.

Does anyone else have any more examples? Windows and .Net world perhaps?

A lot of companies and open source projects seem to have a focus now on making things faster and using less resources recently, which I think is great news. I just updated Suse 10.0 on my laptop to a new KDE and Qt version (3.5 and 3 repectively, I believe), and things are really faster and more responsive now. I'm eager to download the Gnome live CD too and test.

Java 1.5 and upcoming 1.6 have improved startup speeds, GUI rendering (single threaded Open GL) and cut down on real and precieved memory usage too.

Does anyone else have any more examples? Windows and .Net world perhaps?

OK, does beta count?
June 2005 it became available.
See also http://dabar.cowblock.net/archives/000365.html and http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2 SE/Desktop/mustang/

BTW, there is a third-party project providing a look and feel for Swing which fixes some of the bugs with Sun's implementation which would otherwise take forever to fix.

It's called WinLAF.

C# and .Net are actually much more "free" technologies than Java is

Microsoft is in complete control over the future of the C# language and the .Net libraries and runtime. Just because they do the standards dance doesn't mean they've given up control. Do you honestly think that C# or .Net can change in a way Microsoft doesn't approve of?

The ECMA even allows the standard to be patent-encumbered as long as Microsoft provides "reasonable and non-discriminatory" licensing fees. That makes me feel completely safe.

Microsoft's policy on making changes is to solicit customer feedback and then work internally to come up with the design. Compare this to the JCP. I'm sure that, in practice, Sun has more clout than the other participants, but their control isn't total. Design-by-committee may or may not be be stupid, but it is definitely more open.

Have you seen the Java 6 website? No, the license isn't the friendliest, but it's the production JVM. Rotor is just the research implementation.

Don't get me wrong...I think C# and .Net are open enough to allow implementations like Mono. I, personally, don't believe Microsoft will sue. I just don't understand how you can say C# and .Net are "much more" free than Java.

there's nothing at all "closed" or "proprietary" about C# or .Net [emphasis is mine]

Aside from the production implementation and the related patents, right?

Hmm... does this look familiar to anyone? https://lg3d-core.dev.java.net/ So really, who cares about Vista, other than Microsoft, investors and "analysts" like Gartner??? Is Vista really a reason to send MS your hard earned $$$? Are they going to make agreements with game developers to say, "Make this only run on Vista... because we don't think gamers will have the option of playing on a PS3 or Revolution system"??? Seriously, what's the selling point of Vista? "Security" updates that track your system usage released a week after the gold version?

As I understand it, the various pipelines of the Cell chip tend to be more specialized than the Coolthreads technology Sun is using on their new T1 processor. However, even with 32 full-blown pipelines, Sun is also concerned about whether their chips will be put to good use or not.

I'm not quite sure what IBM is planning to do, but Sun has started a contest to see who can build the coolest program that takes advantage of their new Coolthreads technology. The prize is a cool $50,000, so Sun seems to be serious about this. The results of the contest may very well prove whether the new parallel technologies have a future or not.

Better yet, you can try it for yourself:

https://mustang.dev.java.net/

The sourcecode is also available under a non-contamination agreement.

The Desktop features of Mustang are documented here.

To clarify, Java doesn't even load in the entire library at startup: it simply gives the library a virtual address (via mmap()) so that it can be automatically loaded by the OS when it is actually needed. This resuls in less actual memory usage because different processes can share the memory pages, but it makes each process in top appear much larger.

However, to combat the illusion that Java uses a ton of memory, they're changing it in 1.6. Full details here: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/xiaobinlu/archive/200 5/08/perception_real.html

The directory mounting is long gone in NetBeans. Give NetBeans a new try, really.
Also look at GlassFish for an Open Source version of TopLink (EJB 3 implementation)

You could check out this netbeans flash demo that explains the ease-of-use of developing a Java EE 5 application. That includes adding JSD support to the project.

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/binod/archive/foss-in -2005-GlassFish-EJB3Persistence-NetBeans-Demo.swf

If your doing java development netbeans is an option. Eclipse has forced it to become much better. Although it doesn't use SWT. I prefer eclipse, but have friends who swear by net beans. Unlike most people in this situation we still talk to one antoher (java ide's seems to cause religous battes, like vi vs emacs.. etc..). This kind of battles are silly.

http://www.netbeans.org/
http://community.java.net/netbeans/

than there is sun's java studio...what is this?? I don't know , but its free now and seems to be yet another ide.

http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/devtools/free/i ndex.html?cid=16052

https://amateur.dev.java.net/

free clone that uses the Quicktime APIs to a new client ...

IMHO, C/C++ is far from dying. It's getting stronger than ever atleast in the realm of software engineering. I see it finding it's nitch closer to the hardware and in core of advanced software where speed and optimization is important.

Dunno what you mean by "advanced software", but C has its place when programming near hardware. C++ will hopefully die and take buffer overflows and memory leaks with it.

Like, you wouldn't write a 3D game engine in java, atleast not yet anyway.

Quake 2 remade in Java runs just fine. It does use LWJGL, since Java doesn't have native OpenGL bindings - but the engine itself is pure enough Java to go through the Sun's JDK compiler without warnings.

Of course, there's Java3D, but I don't know how much native code it has.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum is FreeCol, which has less features than the old DOS version but requires 256 MB RAM to run and takes second-long garbage collection pauses on a 1 GHZ Duron, and has severe bugs relating to Java memory model (it starts threads from object constructors; fixing this made the problem go away) that make it throw NullPointerExceptions and misbehave when run with the parallel garbage collector. I guess some people can program and some can't...

1. Java is open source: http://mustang.dev.java.net/
2. Use Java IDE for Java development: http://netbeans.org/
3. Try J2EE, J2ME. Profit :)

Many java apps, including large, complex applications like Eclipse, JBoss, etc., have been shown to run using Classpath. Kaffe + Classpath or SableVM + Classpath is pretty dang close to a complete JDK 1.4 environment and will run many (maybe most) Java programs.

*nodding head* Yup, but that's still not Certified Java(tm) and Sun won't let anyone call it Java unless it passes 100% of the compatibility tests, which are NOT free (beer or speech). Maybe Sun will change their mind someday, or maybe Kaffe/Sabre + Classpath will become the defacto JVM. But it's not at all a rosy picture. Some of the comments here are illuminating.

By now I just don't care, I've moved out of the webapp space and Java is the wrong tool for my current projects.

Not really much of a demonstration, but I've shown this to a few people when discussion comes up about Python and Java.

I was playing with Lupy, which is a rewrite of Lucene using Python. It provides essentially the same API. I took an example from Erik Hatcher's Lucene Intro (a directory indexer) and ported it to Python. I tried to be faithful to the original code, except where I thought that Python idioms made sense.

To me the code is much more readable and approachable, not simply because it is shorter (25 vs 34 content lines (excludes closing braces) or 31 vs 50 lines (includes whitespace and closing braces)), but the content lines are less dense (33 vs 39 chars per line).
The Python code sample follows. Erik Hatcher's code and full article is available at http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2003/07/30/Lucen eIntro.html
(look for the first code sample that starts with "import").

from lupy import document
from lupy.index.indexwriter import IndexWriter
from lupy.index.documentwriter import standardTokenizer

import sys
import os.path

def index(indexDir, dataDir):
        if not os.path.isdir(dataDir):
                raise IOError, dataDir + ' does not exist or is not a directory'
        writer = IndexWriter(indexDir, analyzer=standardTokenizer, create=True);
        os.path.walk(dataDir, indexDirectory, writer)
        writer.close();

def indexDirectory(writer, dirname, names):
        for name in names:
                if name.endswith('.txt'):
                        indexFile(writer, os.path.join(dirname, name));

def indexFile(writer, filename):
        print 'Indexing', filename

        doc = document.Document()
        doc.add(document.Text('contents', file(filename)))
        doc.add(document.Keyword('filename', os.path.abspath(filename)))
        writer.addDocument(doc)

if __name__ == '__main__':
        if len(sys.argv) != 3:
                sys.exit('Usage: python indexer.py ')
        index(*sys.argv[1:3])

and has a compiler/VM to which you have no source code access!

The source is here: https://mustang.dev.java.net/

Not exactly, but some people are building something like it in Java:

https://trails.dev.java.net/

Anyone did try out Trails yet? They say its like RoR in Java, without the generated code ...

Looking Glass (GPL)

3Dwm (GPL)

Metisse (GPL)

I know bashing Sun in general and Java in particular is almost as popular as bashing Microsoft here on /. But if you want to play with 3D desktop ideas you could do an awful lot worse then Project Looking Glass which Sun kicked off a while ago as an open source project and is already quite advanced. There is quite a fun demo of it here

If you have to use Java, a copy-cat framework for Java is Trails. The linked articles make it look pretty impressive.

Another relatively unknown java framework I've flirted with very recently is Stripes. It's claim to fame is that its configuration is annotation based. Dev consists of the view and action, no worrying about an xml file to sync between the two.

most applications are not free software, period. nevertheless check out the java.net projects area, there are a lot of java apps there.

https://joal.dev.java.net/joal for Sound according to his site.

https://jogl.dev.java.net/jogl for OpenGL

http://www.lwjgl.org/ Light Wieght Java Game Library

Man this guy is good, he won't even let you copy paste his web text.
Seriously, good work, Are you aware Q3 has been liberated?

https://joal.dev.java.net/joal for Sound according to his site.

https://jogl.dev.java.net/jogl for OpenGL

http://www.lwjgl.org/ Light Wieght Java Game Library

Man this guy is good, he won't even let you copy paste his web text.
Seriously, good work, Are you aware Q3 has been liberated?

Java already has an OpenGL interface (presumably what this is using). I don't know what this guy is using for sound (although the Java Media Framework might work), or input, but presumably all of the pieces are already there.

Yes, probably JOGL for the OpenGL. For sound, core Java can handle raw PCM, and JOAL (Java Bindings for OpenAL) can sit on top of that. Java Media Framework is useless and effectively dead. Input can be handled by JInput.

Java already has an OpenGL interface (presumably what this is using). I don't know what this guy is using for sound (although the Java Media Framework might work), or input, but presumably all of the pieces are already there.

Yes, probably JOGL for the OpenGL. For sound, core Java can handle raw PCM, and JOAL (Java Bindings for OpenAL) can sit on top of that. Java Media Framework is useless and effectively dead. Input can be handled by JInput.

Java already has an OpenGL interface (presumably what this is using). I don't know what this guy is using for sound (although the Java Media Framework might work), or input, but presumably all of the pieces are already there.

Yes, probably JOGL for the OpenGL. For sound, core Java can handle raw PCM, and JOAL (Java Bindings for OpenAL) can sit on top of that. Java Media Framework is useless and effectively dead. Input can be handled by JInput.

Interesting. Some links I dug up while looking for details:

More/better links welcome.

What will really be interesting to see is the advancement in real-time interpreted languages like java. This should allow for portability of embedded applications on all kinds of embedded devices regardless of what OS is in use.
More info on real-time java https://rtsj.dev.java.net/