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Mono+Ikvm Runs Eclipse
miguel writes "Today Zoltan Varga announced that he got Eclipse running on Mono using the open source IKVM Java virtual machine for .NET by Jeroen Frijters. This is the first time a complete free software JVM implementation can run eclipse in a reasonable time. This runs with our latest Mono release. Mandatory screenshot"
"One question might be, and I'll be as direct as I can be about this, .Net? Unlike Windows, where you could say it's a product, it .Net briefing day in July
.Net. Things like .Net .Net on a bunch of random
what is
sits in one place, it's got a nice little box. In some senses, it's a
very good question."
- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, at a Microsoft
"We don't have the user-centricity. Until we understand context, which
is way beyond presence -- presence is the most trivial notion of
context."
- Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, on the same topic at the same briefing
"Our biggest problem was policing the use of
Enterprise Servers. That's a great example of where the confusion came
from, because it looked like we were slapping
products."
- Charles Fitzgerald, general manager of Microsoft's platform strategy group,
in August on ZDNet News
"It's about connecting people to people, people to information,
businesses to businesses, businesses to information, and so on. That is
the benefit."
- Steve Ballmer, trying again, in an October interview with News.com
FP?
Does anyone know what the hell this actually *MEANS*?
.. or am I again missing something?
Is this sort of like the one time I ran the TI-85 emulator inside of vMac inside of VirtualPC on a Mac, or am I just missing something? Or maybe the time that I ran VPC in ShapeShifter inside of UAE on the PC?!?!
And, again, we are supposed to use this sort of thing in *ENTERPRISE COMPUTING*
~GoRK
IKVM is a complete JVM?
Miguel, you can cut the crap now.
As I've previously argued, .NET has some nice technical advantages over J2EE, but probably has no hope of overcoming Java's lead. (And even if it did MS would just screw it up.) But the Java/.NET thing doesn't have to be an either/or choice. It only works that way because Microsoft has very deliberately excluded Java backward compatibility from .NET. (There's J# or whatever it's called now, but that's just a migration path.)
Now, various open source people have gone off doing what they do best, and their efforts are beginning to converge:
- Mono, the open-source version of
.NET, seems to be moving forward apace.
- The IKVM people seem to have negated Microsoft's non-support for Java.
- Mono's biggest missing piece is an IDE. Eclipse is a first-rate IDE, and now runs under Mono.
- Aside from giving Mono an IDE, Varga has given an impressive demonstration of the robustness of IKVM and Mono.
So the whole Java versusOf course, Microsoft will almost certainly make silly, unnecessary changes .NET that will render it incompatible with Mono. But that might actually work against them, and destroy the Evil Empire's control of .NET.
Let's ignore all that, and just focus on .NET the software platform. As such it's pretty much designed as an alternative to Java, or more specificaly Java 2 Enterprise Edition. Anything else is just noise -- or an excuse to make cheap jokes.
....and fail badly
.NET "rebuttal" that I linked to above, "For non-profit use VS.NET can be had pretty cheaply, especially if you know anyone that is in college somewhere." Pretty cheaply? For a non-profit (that means charities, churches, universities, the hobbiest who is going to give away his work for FREE)... pretty cheaply? Wow. That is well and truly pathetic. To try and justify it, and say, oh well, you can try to scam an educational discount so it won't be so dear, is even more pathetic.
.NET commercials with William H. Gacy telling you how great it is without really ever telling you anything about it? Microsoft doesn't trust .NET to stand on its own technical merits and it knows it may go like cod-liver oil down the gullets of a lot of people who have seen how the company works behind closed doors even if it were the tech shiznit.
It's benefits a criminal organization. Not one that's been found guilty of crimes once or maybe twice, but lots and lots of times. Those crimes are many and varied, but here's just a few of them: Stac Electronics v. Microsoft, DOJ v. Microsoft, Sun v. Microsoft.
P.S. If you want to split hairs, Stac v. Microsoft isn't a criminal action, it's doesn't stem from a criminal abuse of their monopoly like the other two cases. Instead it was just a case of a small company being driven out of business by willful patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, etc.
Microsoft isn't just one thing anymore. It's too damn big for that. I'm sure even Bill himself knows better than to think that he truly controls the whole ship because it's become big enough that he can't possibly know all the projects, people, etc. anymore. But even a really large company still has a kind of collective personality that it exudes and a large part of the personality both internal and external to Microsoft for many years now is that of a total control freak.
If they don't own it, if they don't control it, if they didn't create it, if it doesn't have a broad stamp from Microsoft on it, then they don't want it. Sometimes it's sufficient for the thing to merely exist and they'll refuse to acknowledge it, other times they need to actively stamp it out because they can't control it.
When was the last time you can remember Microsoft saying they supported a standard? That is, not something they invented and submitted a RFC for, an actual, take it off the shelf and re-implement it without renaming it or "improving" it so it doesn't work with anybody else standard. C++? Basic? HTML? A video or audio codec? Java? Anything?
I'm sure there's something, somebody will point out their excellent support for TCP/IP or something and I'm sure that's true. But if you were to look at Microsoft as a person in your life, you'd wonder what was wrong with him or her such that so much had to be controlled by that person.
When your business is selling the operating systems that 90+% of everybody uses, software development tools should not be a profit center.
Why should I have to plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a "universal subscription" in order to have access to compilers and basic development information? Sun doesn't have to do that? On this point I'll quote from the
Marketing. Have you been "lucky" enough to catch one of the
So they are going to pull a page out of Intel's bum-bum-buh-bum "Intel Inside" playbook and try to sell the brand like it's sneakers and cola. Trust us, you'll look cool if you use it, and we'll keep hammering the brand on TV so somebody who doesn't have much tech savvy in your organization will ask you if you are using it, or have plans to port to it, or whatever, even if he hasn't got a clue what "it" is in this case.
They don't trust you. They don't like what they can't control and they can't control you. They can try and they always will keep trying but ultimately you are going to see them keep trying to do things and always keep a step towards the door just so they can bolt if they have to
The Mono class libraries switched from the GPL to the X11 license, which allows use open source code in proprietary products ala BSD without having to publish modifications of source code to the community . Why the switch? Ximian's chief technology officer, Miguel de Icaza, says the change was due to the GPL provisions. Patents and the GPL make for strange bedfellows
...for businesses to start depending on Mono and related technologies! For us, it'll be like opening your christmas presents and finding batteries already installed!
Ahhh, but I've revealed too much already...
- Microsoft
- Patent Portfolio Management
This is awesome!
.NET's original annoucnement, I've thought that it was a really cool potential technology. As a Mac and Linux guy, I kept myself from getting too excited, as there was little chance MS would do a port themselves to these platforms. But then Mono and dotGNU were announced. And the potential of this couldn't be denied- Mono was/is a project led by *the* Miguel nonetheless. So now, as a Mac and Linux guy, a *free* implementation of .NET was within reach. I probably wouldn't have been as hopeful if it was just some SourceForge page someone put up, but no, big names were behind Mono.
.NET provides many technical advantages over Java and other systems. Hell, I would even go so far as to say that MS *innovated* with its creation. It was a pretty bold thing to base their future on. The technology to do something like .NET has been around for a while, but never before has it been done in a way that interop between languages was so transparent and seamless.
.NET provided such a neat little package for such a system.
.NET can do seamless interop between many languages. Even if I have Jython and Bistro installed, there is no (relatively simple) way that I can subclass classes written in Java in Bistro/Smalltalk, write some of the methods in Jython, and then do the scripting in JTcl. It could be done with a hefty amount of additional code to call various evalLanguage()-ish methods, but luckily, we don't have to do that with .NET.
.NET, I don't have to use the One True Language that any one vendor hath ordained, and with Mono, I don't even have to use the One True Runtime Implementation. With the newly released #Smalltalk, things are looking pretty damn good from here. ANSI Smalltalk, yet access to all classes and code written for the .NET VM available like any other Smalltalk class. And if someone else wants to use my code later on, she won't have to convert it, open up the parts she wants to some RPC protocol or anything else like that- she can just subclass it. Or instantiate it... like it should be.
Since
We have been seeing very steady progress for a while, and now we are getting something quite meaty indeed. If running Eclipse on Mono isn't proof that Mono is becoming a viable solution for many coders, I don't know what is.
Sure, you've been able to run other languages on the Java VM for a while. You've been able to run other languages on various Smalltalk VMs for longer. You've been able to run other languages on Lisp VMs for even longer than that! However, none of the attempts before
I occassionally laugh when some Java advocate points to the Java languages page when someone else brings up that
I am a Smalltalk programmer. I am a Mac and Linux user. I am also an ecologist. The last thing I want to do is switch to Java just so I could have access to a few more libraries for data analysis. I think it is silly for Sun to expect every programmer in the world to switch to its language without hestitation. It may work on the C++ guys, who are usually moving up in the language food chain by switching to the Java language on the Java platform, but for me, it'd be a downgrade. A decrease in productivity. A decrease in flexibility. Etc. The list goes on. However, with
Christ, I rambled plenty for this post...
Many thanks to the Mono team!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Two reasons to want a JVM under .Net. First, although there are a lot of Java VMs out there, production grade VMs are not free. If, for some reason, you already have a good .NET setup, it makes perfect sense to leverage it for the odd Java application, rather than spring for an extra Java VM license.
Second, not all Java apps are 100% Java. That's why we have the Java Native Interface, which lets you call native APIs from Java, and also lets you embed Java modules in native-code applications. (A lot of the programming tools in Sun's Java SDK are JNI apps, for obvious reasons.) Now, unless you're going to get all religious and insist that Java and .NET must never contaminate each other. it makes perfect sense for Java and .NET to interoperate using Ikvm, or something like it. Suppose, for example, your boss says that your next project must run under .NET, but won't give you time to port all your Java classes. Or more generally, suppose you're just open minded enough to take the best of both platforms.
It's not true! And besides, he's cut way back!
isn't it possible to run eclispe under blackdown java (or why is a patented api more free than an open source java implementation) and what about the \. article about running eclispse unde gcj (i think we could call gnu free)
Does anyone really care? Java and .NET are just pointless crap.
C# Development support in Eclipse (via plugins) is still pretty weak. If you take a java IDE, and make it run under a different VM, it is still a java IDE.
I see this more as a watermark for the increasing maturity of the mono project than anything else.
Is there any way to go the other way? From .net to java ??