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Blackdown Releases a 1.4.1 JDK

Posted by michael on from the choices-choices dept.

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."

8 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. gcj? by crow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.)

    1. Re:gcj? by smileyy · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you're talking about the native compilation aspect of gcj, there's a goodly number of things that won't work when compiled with gcj. Most notable is Swing.

      If you're talking about the bytecode compilation aspect of gcj, then you still need a JVM to run those bytecodes in.

      --
      pooptruck
    2. Re:gcj? by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 3, Interesting
      you still need a JVM to run those bytecodes in.

      GIJ, the GNU interpreter for Java, is also included in the GCJ package. GCJ isn't a finished product yet, but when it is, it will be a complete JDK and JRE (compiler, VM, and libraries) with the added ability to compile to native code if you want to, and all open source under the GPL.

      --
      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
  2. good stuff from blackdown by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  3. Finally! A JDK compiled with GCC 3.2! by jake_the_blue_spruce · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  4. Re:The other way around by mythr · · Score: 4, Informative

    J++ was never the problem. The problem was the broken Java VM that was being distributed with Windows. It's the same thing that happened with IE, actually. Few people would actually go out of their way to install the real VM, so Java was broken on a large share of the computers out there.

  5. Re:Comparison to Sun's Java? by tradervik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    IBM's 1.3.1 JDK for Linux had noticably better performance than the Sun JDK in certain areas. There is an extensive performance report posted on www.javalobby.org. I think you have to register (free) to access the report.

  6. NUMBERS: by thufir · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.