Java To Be Opened For Christmas?

MBCook writes "At the Oracle OpenWorld conference, Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced on Wednesday morning that Java would be opened within 30-60 days, which would would mean about Christmas Day at the latest. Sun first announced they would do this back in May at JavaOne but didn't give a date. We've seen rumblings before on this topic. Schwartz also commented on the companies Sun Fire servers, Sun's relationship with Oracle, and general trends."

Comments

Re:64-bit

[thebluesgnr]

We already have one.

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/gcjwebplug in

[alpha, amd64, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc]

Re:License

[Ajehals]

The article only says it will be an OSI Approved License and I would suggest that that probably means the CCDL,

Re:Don't get yer hopes up

[Kjella]

Something I have been wondering.... GCC now accepts Java source and emits either native binaries or Java bytecode. Can it take C/C++/etc and emit bytecode? If it is treating bytecode as just another target what if a C# frontend were written? Could gcc take C# on input and emit Java bytecode on the other end? And if a mono backend were added could it compile Java source to it? And if this all came to pass would it be a sure sign the end of times were at hand?

Just on a wild guess, since C/C++ doesn't target a VM it'd be like saying "we can get assembler code from C, why can't we get C from assembler code?" Going from byte code is easy (well, not really but...) since eventually the byte code has to run on actual hardware, but I don't think there's any good reverse mapping. In the end, I think you'd end up building a x86 VM inside the Java VM, which would have some terrible overhead.

Re:64-bit

[compm375]

True, there are gcj and blackdown, but I was referring to a Sun Java that had a 64-bit browser plug-in. I thought it was implied given an open Sun Java was what the article is about. I appreciate the efforts going into non-Sun Java implementations, but as of now they don't quite have full compatibility.

And HW accelerator licencing ...? ARM, AVR32, etc

[Big Jojo]

Still wondering if this means they'll be opening up specs on how the ARM Java acceleration works ... it would be nice to have some of those free JVMs able to use that to speed up their bytecode interpretation.

For those of you who don't know about this, most modern ARM CPUs -- like the ARM-926ejs as found in the Nokia 770 and many cell phones -- include three processor modes: (1) pure 32bit ARM instructions, (2) a 16-bit compressed version of ARM instructions called "Thumb", widely used in microcontrollers, (3) an 8-bit Java bytecode interpreter. The first two have public documentation. But ARM won't give docs to the last out, because Sun won't let them do that; you need a separate licence from Sun to get those documents. So it's fully within Sun's power to open up some widely available Linux-savvy hardware to run Java a lot better ...

There's another CPU that's in the same kind of boat, the new AVR32 from Atmel. You may have noticed that Linux 2.6.19-rc includes initial support for that architecture. AVR32 CPUs have analogues of (1) and (3) above ... but again, Atmel won't give docs to the Java acceleration out, because Sun won't let them do that. (And for background info: yes AVR32 is very new, likely its audience today is almost all developers, only one model of chip available so far.)

So how about it, Sun ... are you really going to open Java up??

Re:64-bit

[TheRaven64]

Umm, the very first platform Java ran on was Solaris, running on multiple 64-bit SPARC CPUs.

Re:So in other words

[jonwil]

Acording to http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ the SUN CDDL (which is what they used for OpenSolaris) is an open source license. It is not a Free Software licence and is incompatible with the GNU GPL but it is still an open source license.

Re:So in other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the CDDL is a Free Software license, albeit a GPL-incompatible one, according to the FSF. See http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html.

Re:Co-ffeee...

[Shawn is an Asshole]

5 minutes? What the hell are you running? Have you used a Java program since 1998?

I'll do a test right now, with Java 1.6b2 and Eclipse 3.2 with an Athlon 64: 12 seconds to the workbench.

Yep, that's a long time. Keep in mind Eclipse is a heavy app and I do have many extensions installed. Other Java apps I use regularly, such as pdftk (command line) come up instantly and work very fast.

Properly written Java apps are not slow, though if they use Swing they look hideous.