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Java 2 for Linux Released & Blackdown Gets Creds
burner writes, "After quite a wait, JDK1.2.2 is released for Linux. You can grab the final release from Sun's site. Sun has also put up bios for the Blackdown guys. Sun's been acting pretty flippy lately, but this is great news. I've been using Blackdown's latest release candidates lately, and they're excellent, but now there's a final release. Nice work guys! "
I'm very pleased to see this and to see Blackdown getting credit. I have been hoping to use Java on Linux for a distributed network-of-computers project and this release makes the whole thing look more "polished" then using an RC.
Lest you people forget, there was a horrific accident some months ago when developers tried to code Q uake in Java. Please do not make the same mistakes.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Upgrade away, this should be a very stable release seeing as Blackdown doesn't seem to relaese flaky code. The betas were very stable and I have been happily developing with them for quite a while. :)
Now onto java 1.3, 3 or whatever it will be called
It's so disappointing to still see Java so fragmented across platforms. The 'Linux' release is only officially supported on one processor and increasing the officially supported OS's by 50% has been like pulling teeth. It's not the end-all-be-all of languages, but two years ago I had hopes that by now it would be faster and more pervasive than it has become--especially outside the browser cage. Such a shame... mh
Point taken, but misplaced.
/. readers seem to care about. If you wanna bitch, try posting at http://dev.null.com.
Java development is growing daily. The speed with which Java applications and servlets can be developed is unprecedented. The speed issues with Java are decreasing with each release, and 1.2.2 is pretty quick. The 1.3 early-release 1.3 JRE is quite a bit faster, and Blackdown is already working on the port.
This is very good news for Linux, which, as you may have noticed, a few
There was a JavaLive chat yesterday about the Java on Linux stuff. They haven't put up the transcripts yet though.
For Java 1.3 from Sun, the Windows version will come out first, then Solaris then Linux. However, they do want to syncronise all releases together and should do this at or before Java 1.4 - might happen first for a maintenance release.
That's not to insinuate that there's anything bad about Sun's version of Java. Other than it has a history of being the slowest. (Jikes leaves Sun's v1.1 compilers trailing in the dust.)
Also, now that Blackdown have it ported to Linux, will it be ported to different Linux processors? Or just ix86?
I can't see why it should be anything beyond a simple recompile, to get binaries for all the Linux platforms, and compilation speed isn't an issue, as you're not looking to debug the logic. Emulators, such as the ARM emulator, and cross-compilers, should be fine in producing Java 2 for Linux for every platform it runs on.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have been using IBM's Java 1.1.8 for basically powering my backend web applications on linux and frankly it has been working so well I have not seen a need to move to Java 2.
I don't use any of the Java EE beans or really anything major complicated, but my team has built some fairly complicated web sites that use multi-tier architecture with a great deal of success.
From the benchmarks I have seen I wouldn't argue that 1.2 is not really any faster than IBM's JDK? Actually, the benchmarks I have seen argue strongly the opposite.
From what I understand IBM will have Java 1.3 ported to Linux Q2 this year. Is Java 2 really worth it on the backend on linux?
Does anyone know what HotSpot is and what advantage that is going to bring us on using Java where it belongs, on the Server.
I admire the Blackdown crew, and the work they've done to get the JVM working under Linux. Unfortunately however, its not something I can use to write a professional application if I expect it to work properly.
I've done a lot of Java development under Linux this year, and I've noticed several things that prevent me from doing serious work with Java (under Linux). For example, rmiregistry crashes without fail for any type of heavily loaded RMI project. Another example is that Thread objects break just as easily, or refuse to start altogether when you spawn multiple Threads (even if there is plenty of memory available). Luckily I have access to a cluster of Ultra5's to test my applications on, which execute almost flawlessly (I've noticed a few quirks with Threads under Solaris as well, but not nearly as bad as under Linux).
I see the state of the JVM under Linux as being close to a toy. I know all the Blackdown people will probably find this insulting, but unfortunately, I can't do hard-core Java the way I can under Solaris. I do not blame Blackdown in any way for this however. I feel that this is solely Sun's fault.
Thats my $0.02 on the issue. I love Blackdown, I love Java. Bugs suck.
...the real problem isn't the warm-and-fuzzies, (although there's no underestimating the importance of people's feelings). The real problem is that Java is not open-source, and the stewardship of Java standards/apis is not open. The earlier slight to the Blackdown team was just a symptom, the real disease is Sun's unwillingness to let go of their baby and let it grow up into an adult. The result is that Java is still running largely with training wheels. Who wants to see how well the sandbox works when there are precious few applications worth running? Who wants to run an app that is theoretically pleasing but is, in practice, slow and kinda ugly? And not 100% stable? We can fix all that, but not under the current conditions. If things continue as they are, yes, progress will happen, but it will be sloooooooooow... maybe *too* slow.
I don't want to sound ungrateful, but... when are you going to drop the other shoe, Scott???
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I've been using 1.2rc3 for some time on an intranet site using a bunch of servlets/JSPs. Works like a charm. 1.2 JVMs are SOO much easier to use and configure than 1.1.x JVMs. They're much more intelligent about using .jar's, etc. The performance is also quite good, especially with Resin (www.caucho.com). No, I don't work for them, but I'm incredibly impressed by their servlet engine. It also has a cool feature that compiles JavaScript (in JSPs) to real Java bytecode. Plus a lot of great utility classes (like automatic database connection pooling, and XML support). I highly recommend checking it out. We're running an app on a $400 Linux machine and the response is basically instantaneous, even with multiple database queries. --JRZ
An important distinction between the two is that the "official Sun JDK" does NOT support native threads and in fact recommends NOT running it on SMP machines, while the Blackdown release does native threads and SMP just fine.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
I was once very excited about java. Did a fair amount of development under Java 1.0, Java 1.1, and Java 1.2, before we as a company decided to dump the product because of Sun's mismanagement of the standard and their lackluster support of the Blackdown group and Linux in general. This may have changed for the moment, but for us (and I suspect many others) it came far too late to be of much use (c.f. "sun sucks").
Performance may now be acceptable, but at the time we dumped the product even a small, simple data entry application was too demanding of the JVM at the time (even on Sparc 10's running Solaris, much less Linux). The choice Sun gave us was stark: run the Java VM under Windows or Solaris on a high end sparc, or suffer. We chose Linux, adopted a more open development environment, and now having dumped the product we will not, in the future, ever consider going back (c.f "sun sucks" and "slow"). Using GNU configure and its associated utilities, we are able to get all the cross-platform support we require, even if it involves a quick rebuild of the sources (typing "./configure" and "make install" isn't terribly difficult) with the performance our users demand and languages we can hire developers for (c.f. "use Perl" and "Java sucks").
I enjoyed using Java (despite the, even now, still horrificly screwed up date and time classes) as a language, but the drawbacks were too severe and too critical for too long of a time, and Sun's current and future motives with respect to the openness of the standard and support for Linux, FreeBSD, and whatever other platform we may, in the future, chose to deploy, has eroded our confidence in the product too much for us to seriously consider any future use of Java. Put simply, the stumbling blocks Sun until recently put in the way of development on anything other than their "blessed" platforms far outweighed any advantage the language itself offered (and those were not inconsiderable for those of us coming from C++, with Java's simpler memory management and garbage collection and other features).
Alas, the promise of "write once, run everywhere" quickly became (and IMHO remains) "write once, run where Sun would like you to." At present Sun has chosen to become mildly friendly towards Linux. This is great! However, I would not expect this to remain a long term strategy on their part, unless there are some serious changes in the mentaility of Sun's upper management. (c.f. "blah blah blah").
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I just tried it (weirdx). I downloaded the 1.2.2 JRE from sunsoft, and uploaded the weirdx-*.html files to an http server, as well as the jar file... got nothing but starting java applet and a white screen.
Java never seems to work right for me.
At work we are using a java program (running through X in this case), and it crashes about 50% of the time when you try to start it. This is running on HP/UX.
In other words, I'm not impressed with Java so far. But that weirdx LOOKS really awesome. What am I doing wrong?
JMC
Does this mean that us poor linux users can finally use the java plugin for mozilla ? (oh please please please ...)
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
This is great news. I had been holding the WebMacro servlet framework to 1.1.8 because there wasn't good support for Java2 on free OS's.
Now I can move it forward to Java2!
In real simple terms, HotSpot is a run-time optimizer for bytecode. It sees what pieces of code are getting used over and over (hot spots) and optimizes them - in a way that I believe is similar to storing data in registers instead of memory; whatever that means in JVM parlance.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
With the coming mozilla version (beta in 60 days according to mozillazine), yes.
Jilles
Fuck you, I've been running Linux since 1994.
Actually, its not his multi-threading which is the problem. Graphics in java are multithreaded within the language, which is supposed to aid applets which may need to grab images off of a server.
It is possible to force your main thread to block until images load, but he obviously doesn't know (For the previous poster, look into the MediaTracker interface).
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
...to see if any Greek soldiers are lurking in there.
Really, the README says that only green threads are supported and running under SMP kernels is discouraged. Given the resources Sun has to do things right, this can mean only one thing: it's their way of saying "Linux is OK for single-user toy usage but for high-end SMP stuff just get Solaris, OK?". This is more a PR release "We do Linux, we want our stock to go up" than the REAL thing.
I hope IBM will bring out a SMP-supporting JDK2 SOON! Their 1.1.8 is wonderful and fast. Are you listening, IBM?
Tuomas
It is about time Sun got decent Java support to Linux. I know that they'd rather spend effort on working on their own OS, but if they truly want a language that is portable to all systems, they need to make sure it actually works on all systems.
Now for the negative side. My experience with Java screams that the language is in need of much work. It runs slowly. It requires you to look up the APIs constantly anytime you want to do something useful, and it just doesn't get the job done as well as C/C++. It has a place, but I'm not sure that it is really the greatest tool for Linux programmers when compared to C/C++/Perl/Whatever. Still, the idea of "crossplatform" is nice.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
It's in a early stage right now (version 0.0), but should more people hack on it, we can say bye-bye to Sun.
Umm? It did work. Once that blank screen goes up, go to a Unix box somewhere and run "xterm -display yourmachine:2.0" and the xterm will appear in that applet window. You shouldn't run it as an applet anyway, read the README and launch it from the command line as a Java Application. I had KDE with Enlightment to run through it back to my NT box.
work seems to be dreadfully slow or the game seems to be dreadfully slow :-) they probably got tangled in the no-multiple inheritance mess that is java OO and had to flip their code inside out to get what they wanted (can you tell I'm bitter), but seriously, I would like to see more java games so I could crank them up on the Sun and the Alpha and the p3's and have a real in-house fragfest.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
I do not scoff design time. Design time is the most important phase of development. Doubling design time because of the choice of pointlessly rigid implementation language is however ridiculous.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"