Re: About blackdown
On Friday 24 June 2005 07:13 pm, Dalibor Topic wrote:
> 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.
Thanks for correcting that. I had actually read somewhere (can't remember
where, but read it on a web site somewhere) that it was the other way around,
that Blackdown was a project ot create Java and that Sun used it to port Java
to Linux and absorbed the code. As you can see, quite different, so I
appreciate the correction.
> > 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.
My understanding, though, is that this while AWT has some work done, Swing is
still undone. When I write in Java, I'm working on a client program for my
business that receives data and prints it. Since it goes on subscriber's
computers, it *has* to have a GUI that makes them feel comfortable. So, for
me, any VM or compiler won't help me unless it includes Swing.
> > 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 ;)
I didn't know it was that high. That's good to know. (If the class
implementation is done, does that mean it's also easier to implement it for
GCJ?) At this point I don't have time to contribute to any projects. For
over 3 years, I've been programming solidly, upto 20 hours a day, to get to
the point where the system I'm creating is self running so I can count on a
regular income without having to the vast majority of my working hours
programming.
When I'm done, and have had several months to rest up, I'll be looking at what
parts of my system I can open source and what I can do to contribute to open
source. I don't think I'm that good a coder, so I think it more likely I'll
be contributing money to FOSS projects instead.
> > 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. ;)
I've been using Swing because I had to learn Java, and the books I had
included Swing, which was pretty easy to learn (once I got used to the
overall OOP in Java, which I had never done before). It's worked as cross
platform for me so far. I hesitate to use SWT, because I understand that's
just one more library I have to make sure my clients have on their system to
make it work. In the long run, I'd love it if I could compile my program for
Linux, OSX, and Windows, with all executable and library files in one or a
few directories on an install CD, and easily copy that directory tree over to
the target system. I'm probably wrong on this, but I didn't think Qt could
be used from Java, and I don't know C or C++. (I took a few classes in the
1980s, but that was BASIC and FORTRAN. I taught myself 6502 Assembler and
most of my programming work was in that on an Apple //e. Recently, when this
business started up, I taught myself Perl, did most of the work, then had to
learn Java since Perl didn't give me the cross platform stuff I needed. I
have not had time to learn other languages unless I needed them.)
Hal
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