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State of the OpenJDK Project and Java 7
LarsWestergren writes "David Flanagan, the author of Java in a Nutshell, has a nice writeup on the state of the open source development of the next version of Java. The article explains the difference between the JDK7 and the OpenJDK projects and how to join them. Furthermore, it has an overview of the release schedule, proposed language changes and projects of interest. A more technical and in-depth tracking of the language changes and proposed new features can be found at Alex Miller's blog. This is the first in a series, and 'each future installment will provide an update on what's currently happening in the latest builds from the project, along with a deep dive into a new feature or API that's tracking for inclusion in Java 7.'"
It sounds like they still have no idea which new language features will make it into the release. What is driving them to add new features? Are they just trying to move the language "forward"? If the developer community isn't pushing new requirements then why muck with the language?
OpenJDK IS the SunJDK, is just that Sun open sourced the SunJDK under GPL with the name OpenJDK, minus some proprietary components that are being replaced by the community.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
The OpenJDK is Sun's JDK, only under the GPLv2 license. Sun's JDK may make the source available, but you are limited as to what you can do with it.
http://www.mhall119.com
Ask Apple. They're the ones that maintain Java for Mac OS X, which is why it's close to impossible to get a recent version of Java for any Mac OS X not released in the last three years.
It's good to see that there is at least one project aimed at cleaning up old legacy code. The thing needed most by Java, IMHO, is not more features, but a thorough cleanup of the runtime classlib. The packages and classes need to be rearranged logically, renamed, made to have consistent API's and naming patterns. Redundancies need to be removed (like 3 different RPC schemes and APIs), and deprecations finally need to be pruned. Collections- and non-collections-containers need to be merged, and AWT and Swing need to be reconciled. There needs to be a declarative GUI design grammar. Maybe JavaFX's grammar could be borrowed for that. And the long-promised merging of Swing and Collections needs to happen, too. (Like a popup list could be accessed as a java.util.List)
I have thought for years that there needs to be a "JDK 2.0" series started which would be a clean break from the 1.x series. Keep maintaining the 1.x series, but make a fresh start.
In the latest JDK6 and JDK7 builds, Swing has been replaced with something that doesn't suck in terms of performance and looks halfway decent-- it's called "Swing" and has the same API as Swing. Seriously, there have been vast improvements in Swing lately, from using hardware acceleration to themes that very closely match native L&F's. I'm not sure what year you last tried Swing, but give it another look.
In the latest JDK7 build, they even fixed the "mixing heavyweight and lightweight" z-order problem, so you can mix native AWT widgets into a lightweight Swing UI.
E pluribus unum
http://www.mhall119.com
The one problem for java applications is still startup time. I just don't know what can be done about that except preloading java at boot. Which is a waste if you are not running a java app that day.
Actually, Chet Haase recently blogged about the changes being done in this area. Unfortunately many of these quickstart "cheats" are for Windows only, when questioned about this at JavaOne they said they didn't have enough engineering hours to do this for other operating systems but would welcome community contributions to this with open arms.
Linux and other users WILL still benefit from the Java Kernel work by Ethan Nichola's team though, this will be backported to Java 6 as part of the Consumer JRE project.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
The only open source java project worth noting these days is GCJ.
Anything deriving from Sun's JVM is over. Done. Good riddance.
Right. Because all we really need is an implementation of the language that's mostly compatible with a five year old version, and which as of the latest released version doesn't yet support generics, a critical improvement to the language definition that was made nearly 3 years ago now.
Anybody else confused by Java's branding and versioning? Stop calling version 1.7 of the language Java7. When Java2 was released, I thought it'd be Java 2.0; no, it was Java 1.2.
Now we have OpenJDK, Blackdown, Sun, and so on... Somebody should take Java, call it "Java," and give it logical versioning like Java 1.6.0 and Java 2.0.0. Worked for Linux and Apache. It could work for Java too.