Blackdown Releases a 1.4.1 JDK
gholmer writes "The Blackdown project has finally released a production version of Java 1.4.1 for both ix86 and Sparc on Linux. This much-awaited release gives Linux users another choice for Java besides Sun's and IBM's."
What about using the Java front-end for the Gnu Compiler Collection?
(I'm not a Java developer, but I was under the impression that it, also, was another choice besides Sun's and IBM's.)
You can get all of IBM's JDKs here
All IBM JDKs can be had for all flavors of linux here.
I'm curious, why would I want to use Blackdown or IBM's Java over Sun's Java? Am I missing some wonderous features or something?
Any tables out there comparing the various Java Flavors?
Seems to me that Sun's Java is the most mature of the Java's, and that Sun engineers have the most experience with Java and therefore will probably create the best Java implementation.
Am I wrong?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Jvaa WebStart rocks! apt-get, emerge, windows installer, bsd ports all pale in comparison to WS. You just go the web page of the app click a link and the program downloads and installs itself. The downloaded app doesn't have full access to your system resources (printer, network, loacl disks etc.) until you give it permission. So you can download random safe self-contained applications without worring about malicious authors. Each time you run the program it will (if the networks available) check the server for new versions, and automatically upgrade. Its so quick & painless. Where i work we have a intranet app thats rolled out to 600 people and since we started using websart what was a real admin head-ache is now something that just happens. The app is maintained by us and upgrades could only be once a month, because we had to guarantee everyone used the same version - not as easy as you think in practice, but webstart is my favourite thing ever!!!
finally with the blackdown release the webstart icons will be integrated into the gnome desktop so the java app will launch just like a native app (is done this in windows for ages) our linux users will be so happy!!!!
i'm so pleased about this i just pissed my pants
I thought we were all against choice in Java. Or was that Microsoft specific? I'm so confused.
Now we can finally build mozilla with 3.2 and drop all this crazy crap we've been doing to work around it. I can't believe Sun hasn't put out a 3.2 compiled version yet (plans for 1.4.2 to be though). I don't know about IBM. Anyone?
"There's so much left to know/ and I'm on the road to find out." -Cat Stevens
C++, ain't it?
Microsoft designed its Java implemetation so that some programs designed to run under Microsoft's Java VM will not run under Sun's.
http://www.bea.com/products/weblogic/jrockit/index .shtml
awesome server side JVM
reech bee-yond ur clip-0n
I sure would like to se some detailed changlog on the blackdown work. Its based on the sources from Sun, now what the heck is diffrent ?
Actually, Microsoft did write J++ such that it would by default produce incompatible bytecode. So developers would indeed write Java applications on Windows and then be surprised when they weren't cross-platform. And Sun sued Microsoft because the JVM was indeed non-conformant. That's why it's now called the "Microsoft Virtual Machine" instead of a JVM. Sun wanted Microsoft to update their virtual machine, but Microsoft refused to abide by the contract that they signed with Sun. The courts were entirely correct; Microsoft acted illegally with the specific intent of destroying Sun's Java.
> I'm curious, why would I want to use Blackdown or IBM's Java over Sun's Java? Am I missing some wondrous features or something?
... dot something).
I doubt it. Also Sun's technologies from Java to UltraSparc are well specified and designed so that their technologies are more open (standard) than open source, so we don't really have to go for Blackdown.
But from Computer Software Ideology stand point of view, it is nice to see that Java spec is well defined and has good license terms so that other vendors can implement their own version (production level quality right?) and distribute it legally and freely. That has been proved by Blackdown today.
Personally, I'd stick to Sun's Java (even though some claim that it's not best Java), but announcements like this makes Java even more attractive to me (than
its tiresome for me to have to respond to your ignorance but here is the same old link.
'Be the change you want to see in the world' - Al Gore
A project I am working on involves using soap (ApachesSOAP) as a transport layer and performing serialization of data to xml using Castors xml abilities (so xerces as well). It also uses the JDO part of castor to persist the data, and also to keep logs and some more complex things as well (PostgreSQL for this test). (I am running system on a Linux 2.4.19 machine with a 2.20GHz Intel CPU. (No swapping occured)
Here are some numbers for a test involving simply serializing one of the complete object trees of data using castor, in a loop executed 1000 times:
Sun JDK 'java version "1.3.1": (avg/3) 5.8s
Sun JDK 'java version "1.4.1_01"': (avg/3) 6.4s
Blackdown 'java version "1.4.1": (avg/3) 5.3s
Sending a message with the the above generated xml full cycle through the system (multiple threads of execution here, multiple database connections as well (pooled), passing data over soap, etc), looped 200 times took the following times: (again, avg.)
(sun 1.4.1): 44.2s
(sun 1.4.1): 44.6s
(bd 1.4.1): 41.4s
In both the coded test, and the real world situation, Blackdown's JDK outperformed Sun 1.4 and 1.3 jdks.
I have a lot of Crapintosh G3s lying around at work that I have "revived" by putting Linux on em. (OS X runs way too slowly)
Blackdown is what I've been using for 1.3 java, I can only pray they have a PPC one in the works (with a JIT compiler would be great as well!!)
Anyone have information on this?
--Zuchini
I just wish that ANYONE would come out with a modern JDK for FreeBSD. No, I'm not happy with the patchwork solution, and I'm not happy with linux emu (memory overhead, thanks).
Great...a new x86 java now if only we had an Alpha version.