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."

FYI

[Saija]

The official news on the red hat site:http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2007/sun_java.html/ [redhat.com]
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

[Ed Avis]

Well, quite. If Java doesn't have a good-quality, free implementation then I'll dump Java and use something else instead. gcj and gij are heroic efforts but they were always trying to catch up to a semi-proprietary standard.

'closed source' is an inane term. I don't think anyone from gcj or gij was describing Sun's Java as 'closed source'. It's non-free, which is what matters. Merely being able to look at the source code doesn't mean you have freedom to use, share and change the software.

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:Other Linux Java Options?

[Saija]

Thats the reason because sun is working in what they call "the consumer jre", please check this pages: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/chet/archive/2007/05/consumer_jre_le.html/ [java.net]
and this https://jdk6.dev.java.net/6uNea.html/ [java.net]

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: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 [gnu.org]http://gcc.gnu.org/java/ [gnu.org]

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 [javalobby.org]:

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 [wikipedia.org] references "Wielaard, Mark [klomp.org] (2007-06-07). IcedTea [wildebeest.org]. 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: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 [sun.com] 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.

That's how flash won the web

[porkThreeWays]

It's probably too late for java to overtake flash in that market segment, but if Sun had originally done this, they would have probably won the web war. The two biggest complaints about java are, the JRE is too big to download, and the programs take too long to start. This is 99% of people's impression of java. They don't care that it's perhaps one of the best general purpose languages out there right now. They care it takes 10 seconds longer than flash to run a simple program. Sun should have never half-assed that aspect. Either do it right or don't do it at all.

Re:Will anything change for end users?

[petermgreen]

You can already, icedtea contains a java plugin from amd64 based on work from the gnu classpath project.

Re:Will anything change for end users?

[bytesex]

That's not the result of the openness of the JDK or the JVM; the specs for both were always open. Sun always gave you the src.zip for the JDK, and they provided the bytecode spec and in what way to run such bytecode openly and free op charge.

Re:parallel universe

[EricTheRed]

> Which is the same way they do it in every other framework. Swing is slower than the others and now it is all Swing users fault?

I wasn't blaming swing users, but from past experience most don't follow the Swing event model, even when it's documented well. Virtually all are creating swing objects outside of the Event thread (EDT).

> I can understand that for very large operations but if I have to create a thread for every event driven operation, I am done for.

No is did not say for every operation, I said for the expensive ones like file or network IO. When swing appears slow 99% of the time its because of something in the background holding up the Event thread.

> Multi-threaded programming is just hard.

Sure it can hard if you have to handle concurrency, but what I was trying to say here isn't that hard.

Making the Action (running inside the EDT) invoke some code within a thread Executor or thread pool is only a couple of extra lines. Making state changes to a swing component to display the result is a couple of extra lines (using SwingUtilities.invokeLater()). That's not hard at all...

> Perhaps he felt that he wasn't paid enough for that?

As for if he wasn't paid enough, that didn't come into the equation. Yes he was a junior developer, but he refused point blank to learn which the other junior developers (not just the Java ones) were eager to do.

Re:Getting harder to choose: Java or Python?

[jpfed]

They each have their advantages and disadvantages. According to the great computer language shootout [dada.perl.it], 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.

Re:Will anything change for end users?

[M. Baranczak]

The src.zip only contained parts of the source code.

Re:Other Linux Java Options?

[ttfkam]

What does the uncompressed local copy have to do with download times? 14MB compressed takes just as long as 14MB uncompressed. If you think that your CPU can't handle fast decompression, just think of all of the web sites that gzip their content for network efficiency.

As for the complaint about docs, are you serious? Are you seriously complaining that there is too much documentation available in HTML format? And optional documentation at that? Think about what you're saying for a second: that you consider it a drawback that every class, method, and member of the JRE is consistently documented in detail.

GUI: AWT versus Swing are native widget peers versus internally rendered widgets.

RPC: RMI, CORBA, and XML-RPC/SOAP are for the following in order: RPC in a 100% Java environment, cross-platform binary RPC, and XML text-based RPC. There is a place for each of those.

XML parsers: are you referring to the SAX, DOM, and StAX parser APIs -- which would make three? Or do you mean two parsers like Crimson and Xerces. I think the former is self-evidently a good thing. The latter is due to compatibility and consistency through multiple releases as the older parser behavior may be necessary for an older app even if it's a little slower or more memory inefficient.

I can see your argument against including a scripting language, but Sun wanted to include a reference implementation of their pluggable scripting interface.

I/O: Blocking vs. non-blocking. What's the problem? Both have their uses.

What you call bloat, some would call completeness. Let's compare against some other popular languages.

Common Lisp: 10MB
Latest Python download for OS X: 17.9MB
Latest Perl download for OS X: 33.5MB (Linux version is between 18.9 and 24.8MB)
Latest Ruby (without Rails) download for OS X: 13.71MB

But don't take my word for it. Download for yourself. The only reason these other languages seem smaller to you is because they are bundled seamlessly with your Linux distribution.

Want database access, RPC, non-blocking I/O, XML parsing, etc. from those languages? Too bad, that's another download. Sure there are resources like CPAN, but why are their cores so bloated? Somehow Java is able to provide all of those "bloated" APIs at about the same download size as those languages that lack them.

And don't get me started on C and C++. They don't even have a standard database layer, XML library, or the like for you to download separately. Learned one non-blocking I/O library? Too bad, your new company uses a different one. Do you think ODBC is a good solution? Obviously you've never programmed for it.

I'm sure I could go on, but you get the picture.