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Didn't they get the ESR memo that Java isn't popular in open source projects?

Well, they were handing out flyers titled "Escape the Java trap". They are promoting the free/open alternatives (SableVM, GNU Classpath, , Kaffe, et cetera).

Similar issues apply to copyrights. I assume there are portions of the Java implementation which are copyrighted from other companies which have licensed to Sun, but do you think these agreements are compatible with Sun putting something out under GPL or BSD? I wouldn't think so.

All of this is a bummer, to put it one way. I can think of some awesome projects to do with Java. How about a TRUE Java Desktop, where we take just enough of the Linux kernel to boot, and rewrite most of the system (device drivers and all) in Java and run the JVM essentially on the "bare metal" with all the apps in Java? That would be awesome, but impossible unless the JVM is Open Source.

Ah, and this brings me to MONO, a project which is a tragedy because it is walking into a big trap called "patents".

The right thing to do is to put the effort into gcj and Kaffe to bring them up to commercial usability. I really think it is time to abandon C/C++ for writing apps. We could debate this all day long (ok, on /., we could debate it until the heat death of the Universe) but the fact is that C++ is a pain to work in and lacks the safety features of Java. I would love to see Open Source development shift to Java. I am scared of Open Source development shifting to MONO/C# because I know that it's a trap.

-------
Create a WAP server

due to the license constraints on Java Linux distro's are unable to ship java (except for gcj which is not complete).

Hell, 100+ posts and no one cared to mention kaffe yet ???

I've used kaffe for the papers that you will find in the Gecco 2001 and IJCAI 2003 proceedings under my name (just look at the pics). It's there, and it simply works, with AWT and all. No Swing yet but hey, who on Earth actually uses Swing unless forced to ?

Thomas Miconi

*Sigh*... you can get precompiled binaries for Windows x86, Linux x86, Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86. Whoopie. Gee, how exciting.

Oh, and the downloads page actually confused me for a second. They have a giant section labelled "32-bit/64-bit for Windows/Linux/Solaris SPARC
32-bit for Solaris x86". I kept thinking, "Why do they offer a Linux SPARC version but not a Linux x86 version??" Then I figured out how to parse it. When they write "Linux", they mean "Linux x86", because there aren't any other Linux architectures on the whole planet, right? Sheesh.

Excuse me while I continue not using Java(R)(TM) on my HP-UX workstation at work, or on my OpenBSD x86 box at home (but Kaffe sort of runs on the latter).

Why can't Sun just release a god-damned TARBALL OF THE SOURCE CODE and say, "Here you go. Here's Java 1.5.0 release candidate 1. We'd like to have some help porting it to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, BeOS, Mac OS X, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, IRIX, and so on. Patches are welcome. In fact, we've released the entire thing under the new BSD license (without advertising clause), so you can integrate it with your applications, include it on official Debian CDs, etc."?

*Sigh*

All good points, but I think your post needs to have the word "yet" appended.

Lol, I'd be willing to bet if Sun went under there would be some major difficulties in the industry.

How much money are you willing to lose on that bet?

There are plenty of free or open source and third party sources for Java compilers, JVMs, bytecode compilers, class libraries and related apps.

Sun could disappear tomorrow and Java would continue.

You seem to be confused between specification and implementation. It doesn't make sense to claim that Java isn't Open Source, since there are various Open Source and Free Software implementations of Java compilers, runtimes and libraries in addition to the proprietary ones. Here is a good list. Some of these Free implementations have been around much longer than Mono. Mono isn't the only Free implementation of DotNet; there's also DotGNU.

You mean like Kaffe?

The Java class library, the language standard, and even the bytecode itself has been pretty well documented in many sources across the web. There's nothing preventing you from making your own version should you wish to - it's just that most people have decided that one of the existing implementations are "good enough" for their uses, just like many people decided that Windows 98 was "good enough."

I personally still don't buy this "Java is an SUV" argument. A programming language is a tool, and a bad programmer can write horrible code in any language or environment. I've said this before on ./, but knowing which tool to use and why you're using it is the most important thing to realize when you're programming.

it already exists and it's called kaffe.

You'll see from the email archives that they are busy implementing the latest JDK specifications, which are publically available.

Okay, I checked the email archives, and I found this:

http://www.kaffe.org/pipermail/kaffe/2003-June/042 759.html

You said that "All of the Java platform is available on a free license for open-source developments", but it looks to me like Sun is locking down anything new under the SCSL. SCSL isn't a free license; the Kaffe guys say so, and I agree with them.

So, are you saying that the SCSL is a free license, or are you saying that Sun is releasing new Java stuff under some other license, or what?

Can you give me a link to some web page or email or something that says that I'm wrong and Sun released the latest Java specs under a free license?

steveha

"You've said it! You have to port C code!! Java is cross-platform by design, not portable."

Uh, I think anyone rolling-out a government-wide payroll system will know how to use a compiler.

GNU runs on pretty much every computer yet invented, thanks to automake, autconf, gcc, the GNU libraries (GTK, gnome, glibc...), and the GNU application standards. I didn't see anyone re-writing grep in java, and when people needed massively cross-platform applications (mozilla, gimp, kaffe), they weren't looking at Java for those either.

"porting C code is just a matter of making sure the library you use on OS A is also ported on OS B"

Kind of like making sure the virtual machine you use on OS A is also ported to OS B? Or that the Java AWT libraries you use in OS A are also ported to OS B?

The only true cross-platform GUI code I've seen recently is Konspire2B, and that was pure C, using an http://localhost:6065/ web-interface for the GUI. They chose not to use java because you'd need to install a java machine to use it. With C, you can just run the program as-is.

Look at any of the user-interface modules for perl, for ruby, or for java, and the chances are they'll be written in C.

(sun won its suit against microsoft that it was unfairly squeezing out the java vm - then promptly sued microsoft for posting the microsoft jvm on windowsupdate.com because the license from sun didn't explicitly allow that. they won the suit and for some time windows users just couldn't get their hands on a vm. and if that doesn't decimate any gains from using java, i don't know what does)

What are you talking about? Windows users have always been able to get their hands on a JVM, just not the Microsoft one because of the lawsuit. Nothing stopping users from downloading one of the many other implementations of the JVM on Windows.

There is only one implementation of Java, together with its derivatives by licensees. As long as that is all there is, its license matters, because nobody has demonstrated so far that they are capable of producing an independent implementation.

So what about these VM's?

You can't just mix and match libraries. If you run a version of Java linked against old libraries, it won't be able to load code linked against new libraries, it will have security holes associated with the old libraries, etc.

But you can still do it if it's critical, and security holes only matter when security holes in Java align with security holes in the library. The point is it will still work. How much Native linking code is around anyway - most of the OS Java projects I've seen are all pure Java, and you want it that way when possibly precisely for this reason. So your argument is a good one to avoid native code, but that's it.

The ability to fix bugs and recompile packages from source is at the core of open source systems. It is what has made Linux such a success. It makes no sense for open source developers to say that open source is a good idea, but, hey, for Java we don't really need it.

While it is useful it is not nessicary - look at videocard drivers for an example. Yes it's more annoying but to claim it just will not work is provably false by example.

The Windows and Java APIs are documented in pretty much the same way: as a huge collection of vendor-supplied documents aimed primarily at programmers. Neither set of documentation rises to the level of a "specification", and both have significant gaps. That's why making a third party Windows implementation was very difficult, and the same appears to be true for Java. Sun Java really is like Microsoft Windows in that regard.

Now that is just plain ignorance. What part of the specs are not up to snuff? The bytecode is 100% described in detail. The libraries all have JavaDoc describing exactly what the API does.

Look at GCJ, they have made great strides in the area of VM copying. Again, this has not happened more rapidly not because it is not possible, but because the motivation is not there. RedHat finally has enough motivation to try for a 100% OS Java.

You say that it is perfectly fine if there exists only a single, proprietary implementation of Java as long as it is owned by Sun, but if that implementation were owned by Microsoft, it would be bad? Where is the logic in that? My point is that there are MANY VM's - you have at least Sun's and IBM's. Also these MANY VM's run on MANY platforms.

Now take a world where Microsoft hijacked Java. The "real" VM would run on WINDOWS. NOTHING ELSE. Do you get the point? It would mean that if you wanted a server you would need a WINDOWS server and not LINUX, because LINUX would not have the OFFICIAL JAVA.

Yes Java is THAT FUCKING IMPORTANT TO LINUX IN THE ENTERPRISE RIGHT NOW TODAY AT THIS VERY MOMENT. If you don't understand that, then you must not do development for companies or live in Fiji on the beach.

As an example our company is finally consider Linux servers - but ONLY BECAUSE WE CAN RUN Java and WEBLOGIC on the server! Otherwise Linux would be a no-go. And there are thousands of enterprises making the same choices right now. Think about it.

Like it or not, Linux and Java share the same fate now. Red Hat can see that, so you should think rather carefully before dismissing the notion. Some of your critisms hold some weight, but they are completey beside the fact that Java is the #1 force pushing Linux into the enterprise.

Let's say my information was out of date.

Transvirtual Technologies was founded to commercialize Kaffe, and for several years, Transvirtual drove the development and direction for Kaffe. Microsoft made a significant investment in Transvirtual (see the Wired article), after which I stopped paying attention to Kaffe, since all Microsoft was interested in was Java 1.1 compatibility.

Apparently in March, 2002, Tim Wilkinson (the original creator of Kaffe, and the one-time CEO of Transvirtual) was no longer associated with Transvirtual, and had turned over maintenance of Kaffe to Jim Pick (see announcement here). Transvirtual faded in July, 2002 (see note here), leaving Kaffe free to go its own way.

I've looked through the Kaffe.org website, and I can't tell what version of Java it supports. It looks like they've added some Java 1.2 support, but LOTS of work would need to be done to bring it up to Java 1.4, which is my development target these days.

Let's say my information was out of date.

Transvirtual Technologies was founded to commercialize Kaffe, and for several years, Transvirtual drove the development and direction for Kaffe. Microsoft made a significant investment in Transvirtual (see the Wired article), after which I stopped paying attention to Kaffe, since all Microsoft was interested in was Java 1.1 compatibility.

Apparently in March, 2002, Tim Wilkinson (the original creator of Kaffe, and the one-time CEO of Transvirtual) was no longer associated with Transvirtual, and had turned over maintenance of Kaffe to Jim Pick (see announcement here). Transvirtual faded in July, 2002 (see note here), leaving Kaffe free to go its own way.

I've looked through the Kaffe.org website, and I can't tell what version of Java it supports. It looks like they've added some Java 1.2 support, but LOTS of work would need to be done to bring it up to Java 1.4, which is my development target these days.

No, you're mistaken - Kaffe is "an independent, free software community project."

Check out the Kaffe Page and read about it.

it only makes sense to create an open source version of the core platform.

I thought there were already open source java's out there...

I guess Blackdown and Kaffe are mirages.

According to the Kaffe website, it is a "a clean room implementation of the Java virtual machine, plus the associated class libraries needed to provide a Java runtime environment. The Kaffe virtual machine is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License."

You can always use Kaffe if it bothers you to have any Sun code in your Java VM. Lot's of choices with Java...

That should read Kaffe and Parrot, got my Java developments confused...

And why would I care about that?

Yes, the folks doing Kaffe would like to have access to the Sun test suites, but lack of certification will not stop my application from running.

No native JDK 1.4.

Ridiculous claim since Linux binaries are supported at the kernel level.

DISCLAIMER: My experience is with OpenBSD, not FreeBSD. (However, FreeBSD users have confirmed my findings in considerable detail.)

DISCLAIMER: I hate Java's bloated reeking guts. Java's only purpose in life is to run Freenet until someone rewrites the Freenet reference node into a portable language like C.

My experience with Java and Freenet on OpenBSD is that the Linux native JDK does not work. Freenet will appear to start up and run, but once you actually start using it, it fails miserably. Specifically, the Freenet node listens for connections on two or more TCP/IP sockets. Connections made to any port that Freenet is listening to will be silently dropped if no data are waiting on the socket (e.g., if you telnet localhost 8888 it will drop the connection after accepting it). However, if data are actually waiting in the buffer, the connection may work, at least sometimes (e.g., if you echo -e "GET / HTTP/1.0\n" | nc localhost 8888 it will work most of the time).

As you can imagine, this makes running the software a fool's mission. Things just break and there's no rhyme or reason to it, because there's at least one case where the behavior is nondeterministically broken. And that's just the case that I happened to discover -- who knows what else is lurking in those murky proprietary-Sun-code depths?

Fortunately, Kaffe 1.0.7 seems to work at least acceptably for running Freenet on OpenBSD. (Don't use Kaffe from the ports tree, which is 1.0.6. Kaffe 1.0.6 has serious bugs, at least one of which is in big number handling, which is essential to many of Freenet's encryption algorithms.) Kaffe 1.0.7 has some bugs of its own -- for example, it tended to crash and core dump on me, at least until I commented out one assertion that the Kaffe mailing list said was probably spurious. (And you don't want to see how big a Kaffe/Freenet core file is.)

Microsoft would likely have supported standard Java and added lots of proprietary libraries

For widespread adoption by the open source community, Java missed its window of opportunity for the most part--Sun's policies still don't make it a good platform.

Umm, there's rather a lot of excellent open-source java work out there. Sun may not have released their JVM source code, but they're not the only ones writing VM's - check out Kaffe for a GPL version. The truth is that the java and perl worlds don't overlap a lot, but we just moved our shop from perl/mod-perl to java servlets and jsp's (Jakarta struts) and it's been well worth it. Java's not going to disappear anytime soon!

If the java community really cared, they'd be pressing sun to make java GPL, instead of whining about the evolution of Free Software... Now... THAT would rock...

A much better solution is to use and support Kaffe, a free GPL'd Java runtime environment which as of late has been under very active development.

This is not a dis of Mono, which I think is a fine project and generally a good thing(tm), but the are open source Java implentations. As Mono progesses, it will run into the same issues that the above projects have of being highly compatible, but not 100%. There will always be some compatibility issues.

as said in the oter post the spec is open and free. the only thing you'd have to pay for is using the name 'Java'.
check out this implementation if you want Open source java

Can this behaviour be confirmed with other OS, like GNU/Linux or Solaris implementations from Sun?
And what about ports which based on the Sun source like Blackdown?

I think this is really bad and if it's true it shouldn't be only mentioned here on the developer page. Java users are also affected! So if this is really true and sends data like visited URL's everyone has to know it!
Perhaps it would be better to use and support free Java implementations like Kaffe than this.

With the agreement about free Java implementation I wonder how Sun's relation to Kaffe is. Will they get the free compatibility test kit? I think they are very inportant for Sun because Kaffe is definetely the most portable VM today.

I hope this will happen. With this agreement and Jim Pick as the new maintainer of kaffe there is a good chance for a better free jre.
Which other free jre's are in development?

Yeah, not like there are any other examples of open source software based on proprietry software.

tlhf

xxx

Also, your linked article talks about a compiler which compiles itself. IE, GCC recognising GCC. Having GCC regocnise BCC, VC++, et al would be insanly difficult. Even more so in this case as Mono is being released after the Microsoft compiler.

Wait, say that again, "third party implementations", meaning what exactly?

Whereas it's true that Sun could smother both efforts (and other, not mentioned, projects) before you can say "standardization process", my experience is that this will not happen. Sun has built a faithfull community around Java, based on mutual respect: Sun provides an infrastructure for "us" to provide input in the direction the language takes, through the Java Community Process, and we assume Sun will listen to us and will not abuse their psoition.

Up to now they have kept their end of the bargain, maybe not always given us immediately what we want, but then again, neither does Linus. I don't think it's in Sun's best interest to betray this common trust, because then they will end up with nothing.

JdV!!

With both Kaffe and Wonka out there, I don't think Java is being ignored by the open source community. Remember, Ximian != opensource community; FSF != open source community. The OSS community is us, and if we want to see Java (or whatever) being embraced, we have to embrace it.

It's being done by IBM, anyone would think it's biased? :)

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of IBM, and IBM has really, really made a JDK multi-times out-performing SUN's JDK.

However, I'd believe the selection of 'opponents' are simily..unfair. :)

Kaffe is surely an easy-pick. Yes it's the only GPL JDK out there but many people(at least Java developers here) would avoid kaffe as it has a fatal security flaws that kaffe team doesn't seem to want to solve it. :/ (We call Kaffe 'MS' JDK'2, not just for humor, but it's really the case. ^_^)

Even the GNU people know gcj is slow, even GNU guys know it; but speed is not a real issue for gcj, it's basically a starting point for all implementation - or reference implementation as we like to call it. We would pick a commercial java compiler if we need it.

SUN's JDK, well...you know what I think it just what you think - IT'S SLOW! Yes, we all know that. :D

Nevertheless I think developer's work is doing a great job here, it confirms something everybody know - that IBM's JDK is fast, and that's it. I don't see it could conclude the performance of native compiled java programs. Unless they include all other commercial java compilers into testing, I wouldn't think we have reached a conclusion yet. :)

Kaffe was originally BSD license, then gpled. is that anything to do with this?
and i'm wonder why kaffe latest released was on 2000

Its interpreted.. or rather run time compiled, call it what you will it will _never_ be as fast as c.

Just-in-time compilation is roughly equivalent to compiling, then executing; this is hardly an uncommon scenario with C programs, is it?

It requires a virtual machine, so it will always be more bloated than c.

Again, this is untrue. Java can easily be compiled to native code.

As the "portability" that you and others in this thread mention, gcc is portable. if you want portable code dont make it closed source.

Closed source is admittedly harded to port, but GCC isn't enough to provide a homogenous environment. E.g. GUI libraries vary a lot between e.g. Windows, Unix and Mac. These are highly cross-platform in Java.

There are "feature-rich" libraries that can be linked to in c also.

This part is quite true. However, the standard Java libraries are more feature-rich than the corresponding standard C libraries.

Java's only good point is its easy to program in, its the modern day equivalent of basic, or visual basic. Once you become a more advanced programmer, the benefit of being easy to programming in is of reduced benefit.

Ease of use is an advantage to experienced programmers, too (as anyone who's spent ages chasing memory leaks can attest)!

Sun will never let java be really free.. they want to control it just as badly as any other large mega-corporation would, its just about money for them.

Actually, considering the existence of third-party implementations like Kaffe, Sun probably can't close Java completely even if they want to!

It's because of the latest release of
Kaffe.
That way, Sun can have a good Java platform.

Suns JRE: http://java.sun.com/j2se/?frontpage-javaplatform

Kaffe JRE: http://www.kaffe.org

Is anybody working on a JRE for AtheOS? Although Java has hardly taken over the desktop (*cough*), there are quite a few useful apps.

Kaffe seems to have been ported to a huge number of platforms, so it may not be too hard to do an AtheOS port as well. The Kaffe homepage has some instructions for people who want to do a new port.

Is anybody working on a JRE for AtheOS? Although Java has hardly taken over the desktop (*cough*), there are quite a few useful apps.

Kaffe seems to have been ported to a huge number of platforms, so it may not be too hard to do an AtheOS port as well. The Kaffe homepage has some instructions for people who want to do a new port.

Java is so slow.

Yet no one here ever complains about the slowness of PHP, Python, bash, etc. -- scripting languages that are almost by definition slower than Java in most circumstances. Why does the speed complaint only get leveled against Java?

The point is that, much like PHP, Java is plenty fast enough for what people use it for. I use it for web application development, and the performance is more that just acceptable. It's lightning fast. I think this perception is fostered by the ancient JVMs that ship with Windows and IE, which are major releases behind the current state of the art.

No one uses Java for GUI app development.

LimeWire, which IMHO is the best Gnutella client out there, is pure Java. It's very responsive, feature rich, stable, and less than 1MB, about the same size as XMMS. Hardly what you'd call slow bloatware, which is the usual complaint.

Sun owns Java. Java isn't free.

I could mention Tomcat, which is open source and which we use in production where I work. But then someone could complain that the JVM we're running it on is still proprietary to Sun...

Haven't any of you heard of Kaffe, GCJ, or GNU CLASSPATH? None of these things are what I would consider production-grade yet, but the point is, Java is only as closed as people want it to be. If you don't like the fact that the best JVMs are all proprietary, then by all means, contribute to one of the many free Java projects out there!

Get past the myths. Java won't solve every programming problem, but if you don't like it, at least complain about the parts that *do* suck (like java.io.* :)

Q

The web as we know it is alive and well with gpl code(and apache's license); (What R U smoking man?) go get some slashcode and start your own opencode is dead site!

Seriousley though, the future of the web lies in Freenet. Thier XML-RPC sounds like standards for future information flows. If all goes according to plan, kaffe will be humming on my webpad.

Because it is not Open Source, it is highly unportable (just try running Java on OpenBSD sometime!)

Ok. On a just-installed machine (complete with generic kernel, yes I know):

(rob@denali:~)$ uname -a
OpenBSD denali.CENSORED.com 2.9 GENERIC#653 i386
(rob@denali:~)$ java -version
java version "1.4.0-beta"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.0-beta-b65)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.0-beta-b65, mixed mode)

That's OpenBSD 2.9 running the latest JDK 1.4 beta. What were you saying again?

You also seem to be confusing Java (the platform) with Sun's version of Java. Open Source editions (eg Kaffe can run on just about anything. Not to mention that you can get the sources to Sun's JDK.

Replying you is probably useless as you chose to be AC...but I'm talkative, what the hell. :)

Recently I work on mobile device and have seen the immense potential of Java in this area.

Bad news is that unless you made a HUGE business deal with SUN and mobile carriers, you probably have problem embedding JVM/KVM in your device for mass production.

Nokia can do that, Motorola can do that; but absoultely not a tiny startup can do that.

So unless we could find a gullible VC, kaffe is our only hope. Unfortunately, checking the bug database you'll find many unsolved problems(probably will never be solved) hinder the decision to put kaffe to use. java.security make it unusable for e-commerce apps, for example.

Trust me, we sincerely hope that kaffe can replace SUN's JVM/KVM. The news that Microsoft bought up Transvirtual worried us, and now our worry come true. As Sun said, Microsoft's sponsorship on Kaffe is just to disturbing Java's development. Now we can see many vital parts of kaffe seems to be missing.

Nevertheless, kaffe still has hope - it's GPL and anyone could create a better derivative from it. It'd be a huge prospect in mobile business.(Man I love GPL).

Kaffe would be killed by dirty business practice, but I'm sure a better GPL JVM will be emerge sooner or later....

Replying you is probably useless as you chose to be AC...but I'm talkative, what the hell. :)

Recently I work on mobile device and have seen the immense potential of Java in this area.

Bad news is that unless you made a HUGE business deal with SUN and mobile carriers, you probably have problem embedding JVM/KVM in your device for mass production.

Nokia can do that, Motorola can do that; but absoultely not a tiny startup can do that.

So unless we could find a gullible VC, kaffe is our only hope. Unfortunately, checking the bug database you'll find many unsolved problems(probably will never be solved) hinder the decision to put kaffe to use. java.security make it unusable for e-commerce apps, for example.

Trust me, we sincerely hope that kaffe can replace SUN's JVM/KVM. The news that Microsoft bought up Transvirtual worried us, and now our worry come true. As Sun said, Microsoft's sponsorship on Kaffe is just to disturbing Java's development. Now we can see many vital parts of kaffe seems to be missing.

Nevertheless, kaffe still has hope - it's GPL and anyone could create a better derivative from it. It'd be a huge prospect in mobile business.(Man I love GPL).

Kaffe would be killed by dirty business practice, but I'm sure a better GPL JVM will be emerge sooner or later....

Your perljvm - The Perl to Java Virtual Machine Compiler is impressive. I believe you've the authority to answer this question.

Sun has its sole control to their Java VM, and the control is extended to other JVM versions. As Richard said, free software build on non-free platform/program is useless to Free World.

We had much expectation on kaffe. However, it has halted its development long time ago, since Microsoft made business deals with Transvirtual. The only free JVM is basically dead now.

I'd like to have your opnion on this: do you have Java in your vision of Free World?

Thanks!

• Lots of universities are teaching Java, and there are many programmers who know it.
• Sun has delivered a very complete set of APIs for which we already know that they can be implemented on many different platforms; .NET/C# relies on a lot of Windows-specific APIs.
• There are already lots of open source libraries for Java.
• It looks like the embedded and handheld market has widely adopted Java already.
• There already is a gcc frontend for Java, allowing you to compile standalone applications.
• There are already several open source JIT compilers, including Kaffe, Intel's Open Runtime Platform, and OpenJIT (the latter isn't open source compliant, but maybe could become so).
• There are already Gnome bindings for Java.
• There are numerous Java implementations
• Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Sun's recent JDK's (1.3, 1.4) have excellent compilers and runtimes, rivaling C++ performance.

Also, while I think it would make sense for the Gnome project to use Java bindings to Gnome, I think Swing itself is getting a bad wrap. It's a well-designed toolkit that runs fine on reasonably fast machines. It's completely written in, and completely extensible in, Java. In a year or two, nobody will think twice about its speed. Most of the performance complaints about Swing are actually just the cost of the initial class loading and JIT compilation. Well-written Java programs structure that load process so that it doesn't bother users, but Sun is addressing these issues with each release.

There are no significant technical differences between Java and C# as languages. C# is neither harder nor easier to compile than Java. C# is not more expressive and it isn't less expressive. As languages, they are interchangeable. The question is: given these other considerations, which is the right choice? To me, the answer is pretty clearly Java, not C#.

Hmmh. I'm a supporter of both Free and Open software (and have contributed few small patches for Kaffe), but really, without flaming, I'm interested in hearing which Free JDKs are overshadowing Sun JDKs? I can't think of any off-hand.

IBM has decent JVMs, but only their compiler (Jikes, which rocks) is really free; VM or key tools are not. Blackdown ports Sun's JDK and it's not really free (it doesn't cost you, but to get source you need to "sell your soul" like with vanilla Sun JDK). I haven't been closely following Classpath, Japhar or jgc, but certainly hope they mature. But, time is not quite yet. :-(

As far as I know, none of really free alternatives even have independent Swing implementation. I'd _love_ to see one, but I've been reading mailing lists enough to understand it's non-trivial thing to do (well, I've developed using Swing so that's kind of obvious). And before Swing is available... well, perhaps since right now Java is big on server side that's not all that fatal, but it seems really unfortunate that the key widget set of the language is missing.

But then again, keep in mind that Sun is not making any money directly with JDK (and not much for other tools like Forte either); it's more about mindshare and priced leadership in the arena. Originally JDK was supposed to be "just" the reference implementation. I guess Sun has never really decided if it should be more or not, though.

Nitpick: that's Kaffe, actually, with just a single 'e'. So your "(sic)" thing is probably not correct. BTW, if it's not obvious, "Kaffe" is coffee in Swedish (and probably at least one more Scandinavian or Nordic language). "Kaffee", on the other hand, is coffee in German...

Now help your mom download, apply, configure, compile and install a source code patch!

I know people who are blessed with parents who know how to program, but my mom wanted to go back to CompuServe after Dad fixed her up with Earthlink because earthlink gave them netscape on the installation CD to read her email with.

She didn't know, until I came to visit, downloaded and tested every email client available for the Mac OS, and set her up with Sono Software's Musashi that everyone's email wasn't hardwired to their ISP. I tried to explain to her before I visited that she could get a different mail program, but didn't understand - she didn't know she was running Netscape to read her email, she thought she was reading her email in Earthlink.

My dad knows a little programming - FORTRAN IV on an IBM 360 via punchcards.

If something breaks on their little Mac (and they manage to do it somehow), it stays broken until their son the software consultant flies home to visit.

Please contribute articles to the Linux Quality Database on how to write quality software, test it, or send in links to quality information and resources that I can link to from the page or write articles about.

Especially important are articles that are accessible to ordinary users or inexperienced programers on how they can contribute in a meaningful way to QA testing of the Free Software product of their choice. An example is my article (still in progress) Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel.

Planning for the kernel testing database that I have in mind is still in a vaporware phase. If you know about designing database schemas I could really use your help in architecting this thing. I could write the database access code myself but I don't want to plan the schema because I'm sure I'd make a mess of it. I've never designed a real schema before.

I'd like to use Enhydra as the application server - it's pretty good and open source. You can integrate it with Apache or the Netscape server, or it comes with its own Java HTTP server built-in that you can use either for testing or production.

When you use the Enhydra multiserver in development the whole enhydra system can run in one Java VM process. I echoed out the java command line from the startup script to find out what all the parameters were then put the command line into NetComputing's AnyJ debugger (free as in beer for Linux) to run a whole web application in a source debugger. Much nicer and more effective than printing "here I am" to the console.

I believe they have Enhydra running under Kaffe now. It didn't when I tried it but the startup scripts now support it as an option. I reported the problem to the Kaffe folks quite a while ago and I guess they fixed it.

Mike