Sun Releases First GPLed Java Source

An anonymous reader writes "You can now get GPLed JVM sources from Sun. Everyone seemed to be expecting the desktop version (J2SE) but J2ME has been released first. It looks to be buildable for Linux x86, MIPS, and ARM platforms. Sun now calls it 'phoneME.' Enjoy."

Comments

And if you want to play with it now... MIDPath

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like this was released back in November with the full Java GPL announcement according to the official announcement.

And people already started hacking it and combining it with all kinds of interesting existing free java projects to product MIDPath

Seems the GNU Classpath, Kaffe, GCJ, etc projects really want to Collaborate and work together with Sun according to their latest release notes. 2007 might be a pretty interesting year for Java and GNU/Linux (and mobile devices!)

Re:Linux is great and all

[EGSonikku]

Pfft, you've got the source, get to work!

And I also want this running on the Super Nintendo this time tomorrow, *snap *snap

Re:Linux is great and all

[IversenX]

You are really, really, really comparing apples to oranges here.

Mono is comparable, yes.

However, Qt, GTK and wxWidgets are all just GUI toolkits! You still need a programming
language (Pascal, C++, Perl, even Java(!)) to use these. Installation will be easier,
though. I'm personally looking forward to "apt-get install sun-java" or somesuch.

Also, it will soon (when J2SE comes out) be possible to write better integration with existing
apps, such as better (faster, more modern) browser applet plugins. That, I'm looking
forward to.

(Oh, and now that the sources aer GPLed, it should be really easy to make this thing run on *BSD if it doesn't already)

Re:Its 7:00 AM and its slashdotted

[Richard_at_work]

Hint: the rest of the world doesnt go on EST. Its not 7am where I am, its halfway through the working day for me - try to think outside your own country, Java usage isnt limited to the US.

Mono is not compareanble either

[brunes69]

While I applaud the Mono team for all their hard work, it is not comparable to Java. Hell, Microsoft's .Net is not comparable to Java yet. With Java, you have a 10+ year old tried-and-true platform. You have 10+ years worth of class libraries written, most Open Source, that eliminate 50%-75% of your workload when writing any application..

Sure, .Net does some things better than Java, like Windowing. But Mono's Windows.Forms is brand new and hardly what I could call enterprise-ready.

Re:Mono is not compareanble either

[alexhard]

While I applaud the Mono team for all their hard work, it is not comparable to Java. Hell, Microsoft's .Net is not comparable to Java yet. With Java, you have a 10+ year old tried-and-true platform. You have 10+ years worth of class libraries written, most Open Source, that eliminate 50%-75% of your workload when writing any application..

Sure, .Net does some things better than Java, like Windowing. But Mono's Windows.Forms is brand new and hardly what I could call enterprise-ready.
And You have 10+ years of waiting for java apps to launch!

Re:Mono is not compareanble either

[molarmass192]

Java is hardly what I would call enterprise ready either.

Man ... that's a +5 Funny if I've ever read one. You obviously don't work in an "enterprise". Take it from someone who does (telco), Java is used in massive deployments where Mono/.Net doesn't even make the faintest blip on the radar. There are production Java apps running with 5-9 uptimes that have been going for years.

Re:Mono is not compareanble either

[repruhsent]

The 90s called; they want their joke back.

Re:Mono is not compareanble either

[Roman Coder]

Java is an extremely poor choice of language for desktop applications and high-concurrency network daemons. That is Java's weakness. Do not use it for that kind of application -- it will never come close to C++ in that area. Its strengths generally lie in areas where the overhead of the class libraries do not come into play so heavily -- some server-side work and servlets, and the stripped-down mobile version (that was released today). As someone who makes his (good) income writing desktop applications in Java SE (Swing) for Fortune 100 companies, I would have to strongly disagree with this (and not just because I want to keep paying my bills either! :p ).

I (as a contractor) come to a customer site, and see crappy Swing-specific code written. Its usually the developer not knowing how to deal with multi-thread programming (event dispatch thread, etc.). I rewrite the app, it goes into production, and the user base loves it. They click on a single web link to start their app, and automatically get updates when new versions come out. They can run it on multiple OSs too (music industry companies use lots of Macs (for example)). Its performance is comperable to other apps running on their OS/desktop.

Java (and Swing, or if you prefer SWT) is more than fast enough to do the job, is very powerful and is allot easier to write to than 3GL languages. But like with any tool (or weapon), you need to know how to use it to use it effectively. And that can be said of any computing language, both 3GL and well as 4GL.

I don't mean to be insulting, but it seems like you really don't know what you are talking about. I would even argue that (especially for businesses) it is the BEST choice of language to write applications in. No idea about using it for writing a game and such, but if you're looking for a 4GL (PowerBuilder) type replacement, its the best out there (even though its really a 3 1/2GL language).

Congratulations to Sun and Thank You.

[dwalsh]

Congratulations to the Sun people who have made this a reality.

They are freeing up the crown jewels, and the significance of that fact should not be underestimated. Free as in 'gratis' and free as in 'libre'.

I am not a Sun employee, but I am a Java dev., and I would like to remind people of Sun's contributions to open source over the years. While the press communications of executives have muddied the waters, Sun have done more in the past for open source than a certain "Think Free" company. That company pressed for open sourcing Java and then bitched about the choice of the GPL.

I would love to see the source to Websphere (not the Geronimo 'Websphere' product, but the real deal).

... for laughs if nothing else.

Re:Congratulations to Sun and Thank You.

[tygerstripes]

Just wanted to say "hear hear". It took 20 posts before somebody actually had the decency to say Thank-you-this-is-a-good-thing, most of those 20 straying into completely niche related topics. I'm not saying they weren't all relevant or interesting points, but thanks for actually saying thanks.

As far as I'm concerned: the short-term impact of this will be decent as people start getting their teeth into the source (as they have done since November), but the long-term impact will be fucking huge. I don't have a lot of personal experience, but this announcement combined with the fact that so many CS degrees start with OOP by teaching in Java means that people will routinely be encouraged to appreciate the power of FOSS from the start, before they get used to the limitations that its absence imposes.

To reiterate: This-Is-A-Good-Thing.

Re:Its 7:00 AM and its slashdotted

[DjReagan]

And here was me thinking that the domain name would be more relevant to where the server was hosted/run rather than where its users came from.

requirements:

[DrSkwid]

To properly build executables for the Linux/ARM target platform, a Linux/i386 build platform must meet the following requirements:

        * Red Hat Linux distribution version 7.2 - 9.0
        * Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE(TM)) Development Kit (JDK(TM)) version 1.4.2
        * GNU Make version 3.79.1 or later
        * GNU Cross Compiler (GCC) 3.4.6 or later
        * Doxygen version 1.4.1
        * Development Kit for the Java Card(TM) Platform 2.2.1

To set up the Linux/i386 build environment, you must do the following things:

        * Acquire Monta Vista Developer Tools
        * Set Linux platform environment variables

Acquiring Monta Vista Developer Tools

To build phoneME Feature software for the Linux/ARM (P2 board) target platform, you must acquire the MontaVista CEE 3.1 ADK developer tools.

Re:requirements:

[lisaparratt]

Welcome to the Real World of Embedded.

Nearly everything is targetted toward Monta Vista, these days. Being fair on them, it's because they were one of the few embedded Linux distributions that managed to put together something with all the neccessary patches to be actually capable of performing well in an embedded scenario.

Thank you Sun

[wikinerd]

I am very happy that Sun Microsystems open sourced its Java and OpenSolaris products. If I buy my own server hardware, I will certainly prefer Sun. Contrast this with Microsoft, which is known for its Embrace-Extend-and-Extinguish practices, its preference to its own shared source licences for the very few lines of code that they ever made public, their aggressive hiring of some open-source people (why? to silence them with dollars?), and shadowy agreements with GNU/Linux vendors. Sun initially tried to use CDDL, but now took a bold step by adopting GPL and releasing actual, useful, working code under it. This means that Sun has open-minded people in its management.

.NET and Java in the enterprise

[jimfrost]

Frankly speaking, .NET is a Java fork. Right down to the bytecode and up through the class libraries. If you are familiar with JDK 1.1 class libraries you'll find practically everything in them in .NET, usually with only package name and method capitalization changes. .NET added a lot, particularly in terms of XML, SOAP, HTTP, and GUI support, and fixed some seriously stupid stuff in Java like classloaders, but it really is a fork.

It's kind of amusing, when you think about it, that what Sun really got out of their lawsuit against Microsoft for their (really, really minor, especially relative to stuff like what Netscape did) modifications to Java was a pure competitor in .NET.

You mention .NET's ability to easily (I'd say "relatively easily") link to native code as a big detriment, but in many .NET implementations that's not used at all. It's easier to work with disparate code like that through a SOAP or database interface. In practice you see a lot of .NET front-ends to traditional servers via a SOAP integration. You see less of it used as a replacement for traditional MFC code, the kind of thing where such integration would be most useful.

But getting back to the enterprise, .NET's largest problem in terms of enterprise software is not that it's less mature than Java (in many ways I'd say that Microsoft took the good stuff from Java and improved it a lot) but rather that it's locked to Windows. Maybe you haven't noticed, but Windows is not a very good server operating system -- not very reliable, not very fast (except in very specialized situations), certainly not scalable. It's all very well and good that you can drop a couple of hundred boxes in there to scale to huge applications, but when you could run the same application on a single Sun you're really not making a cost-effective choice. (I wish I were making that up, but it is actually pretty typical to be able to replace as many as 100 Windows servers with a midsize Sun or two, and that is true not only of stuff like IIS/ASPX versus Apache/whatever that are differentiated by more than OS but also for directly comparable stuff like databases and ETL). Push Windows hard and it will break, often. It's nuts to put it in critical places (although that is done, a LOT, and people pay the price in ongoing maintenance).

Having said that, .NET is probably the single best GUI implementation framework I've seen yet (although that may be damning it with faint praise), and Windows, at least aside from the malware issue, is a pretty fine desktop. In that domain it shows what Java could have been if Sun had been even remotely competent (rather than giving us stuff like AWT and the Swing abomination). We're going to see a lot of .NET on the desktop because it is pretty much best-of-breed. More power to it.

Java is today, and has been since at least the late '90s, often used in enterprise situations. Whether or not it's appropriate in a lot of those situations is debatable, but it is deeply integrated into the core operations of a lot of companies at this point. Personally I feel that JMS is not very good at its job and J2EE as a whole is a steaming pile of dung designed by people who wouldn't know a good application architecture if it ran over their foot, but Java as a whole and these things in particular are out there and being used by a lot of people -- and at least in some cases doing a good job.

It is certainly possible to build robust, reasonably efficient large-scale Java applications. It is even easier to do that in Java than it is in C++, especially if you avoid some of the more ridiculous parts of J2EE. But that doesn't mean it's easy to build that kind of thing, and as you might expect there are a large number of really awful Java applications out there (just as the majority of large applications built on all the other languages out