Red Hat Joins Open Source Java Project

narramissic writes "Red Hat has signed on to Sun's OpenJDK project and agreed to coordinate its own Java development efforts for Linux with the project. Red Hat will align the work it has done on IcedTea (its own implementation of some parts of the Java SE JDK) with OpenJDK. As part of its participation in OpenJDK, Red Hat will eventually create a compatible OpenJDK implementation for its Enterprise Linux distribution and will also use OpenJDK to create a runtime for its JBoss Enterprise Middleware that is optimized for a Linux environment."

Comments

Sun has found religion..

[downix]

Open Sourced Solaris, SPARC, now Java... Halleluiah cries the OSS choir.

But seriously, this business move by Sun has made it far more attractive to my company, enabling us to test out Solaris on our existing server before we perform a rollout. In addition, having the source code for the UltraSPARC T1 has enabled us to do research into how the chip functions on a lower level, with an eye to further optimizing our software to perform even faster on it. Sun, you might win over my heart just yet.

FYI

[Saija]

The official news on the red hat site:http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2007/sun_java.html/
because i can't find references on the sun & openjdk site.

I truly hope for the end of gcj/gij

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Sure, it was a novell idea to try and create an open sourced java but the whole arguments which backed it up were false. Many people seriously believed that Sun was not opening up the Java source code period, while in fact that was a mere lie. The Java source code was available but simply licensed in such a way which didn't really go well with some. And so they simply declared it "closed source" and fooled many people into thinking that the Java sourcecode wasn't available period.

Why I mention this? Because it was perfectly legal to adopt certain pieces and sniplets of code, check the way things were build an adapting those ideas. All of that might have made a difference for the gcj/gij projects. Personally I condemn those 2 projects, but having said that I will have to admit that they did make a good effort.

But the main reason I hate this stuff with a passion is because its not compatible with Java, and it is my belief that all the nonsense (gcj/gij + the bs about the closed source java) has left Java with a bad name / reputation on the Linux platform. Which I think is unfair and an utter shame. Would this have not been the case I think Java could have lifted some interoperable development movements to higher levels. Sure; it has already done this to some extend and Linux is still a big market for Sun, but when the bs was still spreading you could already easily download binary installers (self extractors) to install Java on Linux. But I have met simply way too many people who had problems to "do java on linux" and when you started disecting the problems it all boiled down to Linux distributions shipping gcj/gij thus resulting in non-working Java software. And as well all know; a good user doesn't blame his tools but the product he's trying.

I once spend 45 minutes on the Sun Java tutorial and couldn't get some examples to work. Eventually I tried on another platform, that did work, and so I knew where to look. Eventually I ended up dumping gcj/gij and replacing it, unfortunately I think many others ended up dumping Java.

Re:I truly hope for the end of gcj/gij

[basiles]

Yes, but a (maybe minor) feature of GCJ is its ability to build self-contained Java applications, i.e. to compile some Java source code into an executable which does not require any previous JVM installed, etc...

I admit that there are few Java applications (at least on Debian) which are compiled by GCJ and packaged as plain old binary executables. Of course, this means avoiding some fancy Java tricks (the dynamic class loader, some reflection abilities, etc...).

Still, I believe GCJ does have at least such a niche market (for those few applications which don't want to depend on a JVM being installed).

Besides, GCJ is GCC based, and GCC is still a nice project (even if it is old).

Re:I truly hope for the end of gcj/gij

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Actually, instead of the end, this is just the official beginning: From the intro at http://gcc.gnu.org/java/

Compiled applications are linked with the GCJ runtime, libgcj, which provides the core class libraries, a garbage collector, and a bytecode interpreter. libgcj can dynamically load and interpret class files, resulting in mixed compiled/interpreted applications. It has been merged with GNU Classpath and supports most of the 1.4 libraries plus some 1.5 additions.

From TFA:

Red Hat has signed Sun's OpenJDK contributor agreement and will now align the work its done on its IcedTea project, which was its own implementation of some parts of the Java SE JDK, with OpenSDK, said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management for JBoss. IcedTea brought together the Fedora project with key Java technologies in a Linux environment, and currently provides open-source alternatives for the few remaining proprietary sections in the OpenJDK project, he said.

Yet looking into the IcedTea project:

Red Hat has launched the IcedTea project, with the goal of creating a hybrid fully free Java implementation based on OpenJDK and GNU Classpath. The project replaces binary plugs that are still non-free with code from GNU Classpath "We have been working within Red Hat to replace these binary plugs with free software based on GNU Classpath and to remove the need for bootstrapping with unfree software. This is important for a number of reasons, the most pressing being that only free software may be used to build operating systems like Fedora", said Andrew Haily on an OpenJDK newsgroup.

Also, Wikipedia references "Wielaard, Mark (2007-06-07). IcedTea. Retrieved on 2007-06-09":

IcedTea replaces the binary plugins with the equivalent GNU Classpath code, compiles it all using GCJ and optionally bootstraps itself using the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and the javac Java compiler it just built.

So again, this is not the end of end of GCJ but part of its validation.

Re:parallel universe

[morgan_greywolf]

I must have slipped into a parallel universe or something because it's starting to look like Java might finally make it's way onto the Linux platform in a useable way. Java has been available and has worked well on the Linux platform for years. The main problem in trying to deploy Java on most Linux distros is that the more popular distros started putting GNU Java and GNU Classpath as the default Java VM and classpath on Linux. Sun's Java has been available in binary form for as long I've been using Linux (I started using Linux in 1994). I'm not sure when they started offering source, but it's been available, too, and things like Blackdown have been based on it for a long, long time.

And there are plenty of nice Java apps and environments on Linux -- Eclipse is one of the big ones, obviously. The bottom line is that gcj/gij gave Java on Linux a bad name because standard Java apps and programming examples never have worked on it right. Install Sun's JRE/JDK or Blackdown, and you'll find that Java works great on Linux.

Re:parallel universe

[EricTheRed]

The main problem with unresponsive Swing apps, is that most developers do everything within the Event thread, so the app is unable to respond in a reasonable manner.

If Swing developers remember to move intensive operations off the Event thread and into a background thread, then Swing app's are really nice and responsive. It's not that difficult, but for some reason most developers are either unable to, or unwilling to do this simple task.

Believe me, I've seen the source of plenty of Swing app's that have been written with everything in the Event thread and the developer (one of whom I had employed at that time) refused to do this because they couldn't be bothered.

As for the look and feel, it's getting better but it still has a long way to go.

Re:Other Linux Java Options?

[quintesse]

That number is a bit exaggerated, my install of the latest Java 6 JRE is about 80MB (and the download is only 14MB).

One of the reasons it's so big is because it has a LOT of functionality. But you're right of course when you say that you don't need all of that to run a simple Java application. So Sun decided to do something about that: in the upcoming Java 6 Update N (what was previously called the "Consumer JRE") only a relatively small "kernel" will be installed which has only the most essential components. The rest will be downloaded "when needed".

Re:Other Linux Java Options?

[deander2]

My problem with the Sun JRE is that it is HUGE. Why do I need 100MB+ to run a simple Java application?

you don't. a simple stroll over to java.sun.com will show you that the JRE is 14M for windows and 18M for linux.

the "100M+" is if you're also downloading all their development tools and documentation (and possibly netbeans, depending on the link). not atypical in the least.

Re:Getting harder to choose: Java or Python?

[jpfed]

They each have their advantages and disadvantages. According to the great computer language shootout, Java is faster by an order of magnitude, but is more verbose and usually consumes about twice as much memory. The ultimate decision depends (at least) on your application's needs and the capabilities of the environments you're targeting.