Vote for a FreeBSD port of JDK1.2 from Sun

Several people submitted this, but Nate Williams was first. In his own words: "As head of the current FreeBSD/JDK porting development team it's been difficult to finish our JDK2 efforts due to lack of help from Sun. In order to try and make JDK2 on FreeBSD a reality, we are lobbying Sun using a RFE (Request For Enhancement) on the Java Developer network to demonstrate to them the number of people interested in seeing FreeBSD as a supported Java platform.". Read on if you're interested in seeing more complete Java support on FreeBSD.

Nate continues, "Please go to Sun Bug 4288745, and add your votes to ask Sun into allocating resources towards getting a native FreeBSD port of JDK2 (and JDK3, etc...) finished.

"Voting requires that you be registed on the Java Developer Connection, which is free.)

"This is good for open-source operating systems, and Java in general since FreeBSD is a great server platform used by many of the major internet portal sites (Yahoo, Hotmail), and would allow FreeBSD to compete as a Java server platform directly with less 'open' systems such as WinNT."

It's worth noting that any support Sun provide for a FreeBSD port should also be useful to both the NetBSD and OpenBSD Java teams as well, so we can all benefit from this work.

Comments

Why should this bother Sun

[Frugal]

As I recall about a year ago this was tried for Linux. The RFE sat at the top of the request list by a long way and Sun just ignored it. What has changed in the last year or so to make Sun more amenable to porting it to other OSs now?

Lobby this, lobby that..

[Kingpin]

I doubt Sun's going to support BSD in this millenium.. Ehm.. Anyway, Sun hasn't even given solid support to Linux, one can argue that it's because it's a 'competing' OS - but BSD is an even more adept competitor (when it comes to networking at least). It must be hard for Sun to want to make a technology like Java popular as well as want to make a 'leading' networking OS.

I say lobby IBM instead, their Java stuff kicks butt.

IBM?

[DanaL]

Possibly you may also want to send your protest and petition along to IBM, who has proven to be both more willing, and more capable than Sun of porting Java to various platforms. They've ported 1.1.x to at least three platforms I can think of (AIX, Linus & OS/2) and their implementations have been superior to Sun's. And Jikes, their java compiler, is already open sourced which may help with the porting.

Dana

An alternative proposal

[jd]

Sun took -ages- to even condescend to supporting the Blackdown team, despite the Linux bug being the highest rated on their system.

Once they -did- support it, support seems to have been minimal. It's not on their list of Sun JDK's, Java 2 has been very slow in coming (no fault of the porters), and I've not seen the enthusiasm or energy I would have expected from Sun. After all, it -was- Sun who advocated Java for all platforms.

Instead, I'd like to propose that the *BSD community lobby IBM, for a port of -their- Java development kit and runtime system. I suspect there would be a much higher liklihood of success, as IBM seem to have embraced the concept of "free" operating systems and even "open source" in a way I don't think any other "traditional" company comes even close.

Now, if IBM's Java software can be made to work natively & optimally under *BSD, Sun may feel a degree of pressure to at least consider the platform. I suspect it was the presence of "clean room" implementations for Linux that eventually tipped the balance there.

There's hope, there's Javalinux!

[Steeltoe]

Sun's only interest regarding Java is in money revenue from their own OS, servers and future thin-client model it seems. Pretty pathetic when you think that Java is supposed to be cross-platform. They refuse to make it Open Source, and to cooperate with grass-root initiatives.

But someone[tm] did a port of the various versions of JDK and JRE for Linux, including v1.2:

http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux.html

Hopefully this will compile under BSD with no- or little modification. According to OpenBSD-homepages, BSD is very compatible with Linux. But I have honestly never tried BSD myself, so I cannot know to what extent.

I would've written this in HTML if only /a had worked.

- Steeltoe

Re:There's hope, there's Javalinux!

[Ledge Kindred]

Hopefully this will compile under BSD with no- or little modification.

No, it won't. One of the things holding up Blackdown's JDK 1.2 release has been getting Linux' kernel threads into a state that the JDK can deal with. (And incidentally the work on kernel threads is also why Mozilla works best on glibc 2.1 machines and not so well on glibc 2.0 machines...)

BSD's kernel threading mechanism is not at all like Linux's. Not to mention there are many other kernel dependencies in the JDK that needed to be ported to the Linux OS specifically that would bear no resemblance to BSD syscalls.

If porting the JDK were that easy, Blackdown would have just taken Sun's Solaris JDK source (which you can easily get, even if the license sucks) and "typed make and it would have worked."

There are a lot of OS/libc/kernel dependencies inside the JDK that need to be ported specifically to the system. Fortunately, from what little has leaked out of the black box around Blackdown, this little fiasco getting the JDK ported over to Linux has made the JDK code somewhat less platform-dependent.

-=-=-=-=-

Why SHOULD this bitching bother Sun?

[a2800276]

Obviously Sun's not going to take it seriously if 10,000's of Slashdotters (90% of whom probably won't be Java Developers on BSD) skew the result of the survey?

Sure the Linux-port has been number one RFE for a while, but I would assume mainly because alot of L!nux rul3z advocates are voting for it.

I'm definately NOT saying that we don't want to develop on Linux. I for one do. But most big Java apps aren't yet using 1.2. And there's at least two implemenations (Blackdown's port and IBM 1.1.8) to work with.

Saying that Sun doesn't care about developers just doesn't hold true either. Sure, they can't suit everyone. Sure they don't do everything they promise - at least not right away. And you expect them to change anything just because somebody somewhere yells at them to get it done.

But Sun's community process works well on a lot of APIs they're developing. I know lots of user feedback went into Java2 stuff like Swing, Collections. They work together alot with SERIOUS developers (and not just really big corporations).

If you want to get involved it's quite a bit of work: download the early releases, try them out (and maybe waste alot of work cause your code won't be compatible with the official release later), write up serious bug-reports, write up serious requests and don't just yell "I want it for Linux!"

BTW should this be a RFE and not a bug-report?

Why should Sun support on other (free) Unices?

[edremy]

I think most people here are missing the point. When Sun says "Java everywhere",what they mean is "Java on Windows and Solaris." McNealy couldn't care less about anything else.

Linux on x86 is a serious competitor to low end Sun hardware, as is *BSD although it gets less publicity. Why does Sun want a free OS on cheap commodity hardware getting more software support? It will just make the transition from SPARC/Solaris-&gtLinux easier, something Sun doesn't want. Yes, I know Sparc/Linux exists, but honestly what kind of support does it get compared to x86? With the newer x86s like Athlon SPARC doesn't have the staggering performance advantage it used to. (I'm not talking here the Sun "big iron"- we won't be seeing 64 processor x86 anytime soon.)

"Java everywhere" is a weapon to try and kill MS. Nothing more.

Eric

Other JVM's on *ix

[harmonica]

See the platform page of the Kaffe Java Virtual Machine. They ported it to about anything... But it's only a 1.1 compliant VM.

The Blackdown ports overview can be found here. But AFAIK they're Linux only (although on several platforms). They have a pre-1.2 JDK which runs pretty well.

Re:Other JVM's on *ix

[Q*bert]

Yes, please work on a 1.2 Kaffe version instead! Then you'll actually be contributing to free software, rather than helping a company (Sun) that has shown itself to be no friend of open source.

Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

Re:offtopic - garish colors

[scrytch]

You can moderate THIS offtopic too. I thought it was a netscape bug that the colors in this topic looked awful, but am I led to understand that this is some sort of feature?

Gack, it's awful. Bring back slashdot green in all sections. Consistency is a GOOD THING.

Re:offtopic - garish colors

[Tom Christiansen]

Gack, it's awful. Bring back slashdot green in all sections. Consistency is a GOOD THING.

Agreed. That's why in my slashdot user profile, I opt for low-impact (lynx friendly) transmissions, and then either use lynx (sometimes) or else Netscape with its "OBEY MY OWN COLORS" preference. Or simply run it through the color-stripping proxy.

Re:Write once, run on supported platforms only

[Q*bert]

I couldn't find any information on Transvirtual's Web site about funding from Microsoft. Can you substantiate this?

Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

Throwing away the child with the bathwater

[sfmarco]

Reading from most comments, it seems that SUN is not supporting the cross platform suport for non-SUN platforms. Well if this is their strategy they might loose much more then just their OS. They are probably getting nervous on their return of investment on Java. But having Java mainly working on Solaris and NT is not enough. It's not just words. We need the support as well. If they can't give it, they definitly should move it to open source. (And not wait till the boat is sinking). I've became a bit more carefull. I don't want to depend on one companies strategy. When the Java developers are dropping out because of a lacking cross platform and are returning to gcc, what did sun gain ?

Re:To hell with Sun and Java

[Mornelithe]

Actually, you can write non-OO programs in Java. Just make a class and use all static methods. This way, the class names just become more like a namespace for the functions, and you have to go through the horrible process of typing ClassName.method() instead of just method(). I'm shuddering just thinking about it.

As for memory management, it does make things easier by your not having to worry about freeing memory yourself. Incidentally, you must know some moronic "Java programmers" to declare variables inside a loop. I program primarily in Java, and I wouldn't do that. If someone is stupid enough to do that, then it doesn't matter what language they know, and I'm fairly sure it's not Java that's making them do it. Thinking so is somewhat stupid.

As for portability, it is my understanding that Sun probably won't support all platforms itself. They're supposed to give people from non-Sun-supported OSes the code to help them with a port, like they did with Blackdown. I don't want them porting Java to 20 different OSes, because that uses up resources that I would rathar have them spend on improving the quality of their existing implementations and libraries (although they don't seem to enjoy doing that either, but that's another matter entirely). If the *BSD people want a Java implementation, they should get a group together to port it. If they don't, I wouldn't hold my breath for Sun to support one of their currently unsupported operating systems.

I enjoy your argument about the popularity of Java. Your argument goes something like this:

• Sun says there are 5 million Java developers
• I say this number is obviously inflated
• Since I'm right, Java isn't as popular as they say it is
• Believe me, not Sun!!

I don't know if I believe that there are 5 million Java developers, but I haven't read anything saying there are that many (I usually read stuff at www.javalobby.com, not java.sun.com). I don't know if you were exaggerating or not. However, from what I hear, there are lots of companies that are using Java to develop their intra-company applications, as well as other stuff. Don't ask me for proof, because these are things that people say their employer does in discussion forums, so I have to take their word for it (and I think I can trust them more than you think you can trust Sun).

I'm sorry this got so long. I take no responsibility for errors in the spelling, grammar or usage in this post, so don't nag me about it.