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."

Will anything change for end users?

[visualight]

With all the "openness" going on with Java these days will things get even more complicated? I have 3 important commercial apps that run on java, all three have their own run time environments that are incompatible with each other. I have no end of trouble with jre and firefox. I can't count how many times I've had problems with classpaths trying to run java stuff.

Will the OpenJDK mean another runtime? As in Blackdown, Sun, Open?

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.

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:parallel universe

[Anonymous Coward]

Fairly quick, simple to develop in, stacks of libraries, popular.

Not to mention it's great for creating slow, unresponsive, hideously ugly GUI's. What's not to love about that?!

Seriously, though, Java rocks, but Swing needs to die. At the very least it need to do a wxWidgets and actually look and feel native. The "Native" L&F in Java 6 is much better than Java 5, but it's still freaking ugly and stands out horribly. Even after all of these years and the increases in processor speed an memory, Swing apps still feel very unresponsive. I'm not saying SWT is the answer (Eclipse rocks) as it still doesn't look fully native (select boxes, for example), but it does feel significantly faster and is much easier on the eyes.

At least if they can't get it to look native, they should at least get it to look decent. That ugly purple theme needs to go away.

Other Linux Java Options?

[tji]

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

Are there other good JRE options for Linux? Maybe something geared towards embedded environments?

Re:Other Linux Java Options?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you should know by know that "embedded" and "garbage collection" don't go well together. At least for most embedded applications I'm familiar with - flight simulators, heart monitors, anti-lock braking and engine control systems, etc. Real-time performance and "oh, I'm just gonna spend half a second over here reclaiming memory, don't mind me!" just don't go together. Yes, I know there's been talk of real-time friendly garbage collectors, but .. well, I won't believe it until I see it in action, and if it doesn't perform any better than systems with manual memory management then I won't bother.

Re:parallel universe

[jma05]

> Swing is actually a really freakin' awesome toolkit for creating the building blocks of a GUI and for creating new components. It's just really bad at being an application GUI since your application code is running in the same mix as all the little details of a component.

This is unfortunately true of all of Java. At one end it tried to provide a low level virtual "machine" and the framework accordingly, and at the same time pretends to be a business class, high level framework. Likewise, the language is fine as a base but unsuitable for productivity. Java language (as opposed to the VM and the framework) should take a backseat similar to how C is regarded everywhere else. It should be a language for the tools, for performance and to provide a standard interface (cf: C data types and the OOP flavor in this case) and then step out of the way. JVM languages should respect this interface but take over what exactly goes on in the methods. Much of this has already been realized in made-for-JVM languages such as Groovy. They just need to get the same love from Sun.

Java badly needs a REAL framework on top of the present API that can provide productivity in level with Delphi and .NET. I don't mean something along the lines of Swing Application Framework. A proper framework should be flexible and yet simple enough for a VB developer to pick it up in a weekend. Delphi's VCL fits this bill well. With respect to framework design in terms of developer usability, Java has been a step backwards from what was available in 1996. Of course, there are a lot of nice things about Java when compared to the tools then but the disadvantages seem unwarranted.

Re:parallel universe

[noldrin]

Actually Sun precompiled Java consistently causes processes to hang and I end up needed to kill -9 firefox. Now that I have the open source sun java compiled by Fedora the system is rock solid and haven't needed to kill -9 firefox once. I've had the same results with flash vs gnash. Besides being overly restricting, closed sourced software just tends to suck more.