Re: About blackdown
Hal Vaughan <hal <at> thresholddigital.com> writes:
> Blackdown, and all the other FOSS implementations of Java are noble
> undertakings and I look forward to the day I can use a completely FOSS
> version of Java on Linux, OSX, and the Redmond OS.
Unfortunately, Blackdown is neither Free Software nor Open Source. It is a port
of Sun's proprietary source code and therefore must abide by Sun's licening
rules, which explicitely prohibit reuse of Sun's proprietary source code in open
source projects.
> I will also be VERY glad
> when GCJ is done and I can compile my classes into native code.
Depending on your classes, that is possible today already. Fedora Core 4 ships
120+ packages all built with gcj.
> However,
> until then, not all classes are implemented in any FOSS version of Java.
~80% of 1.4 are done atm, feel free to help finish off the rest faster. Fixing
puzzling bugs beats solving crosswords on a lazy sunday ;)
> For
> me, the biggest problem is that they don't include the GUI classes. I think
> one has some AWT classes, but I have yet to see anything other than Sun's JVM
> that has Swing working.
Most of AWT is done, afaik, Swing is being rapidly hacked on. Swing is a bit of
a complex API, though, and chances are it will take a little while to make it
all work as well as the rest of the system. Use SWT, AWT, Java-GNOME or SwingWT
instead, which all work fine, or do yourself a favour and use a really good
cross-platform toolkit like Qt. It's Free Software, comes packaged with Debian,
and in general beats dealing with Swing by miles. ;)
cheers,
dalibor topic
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