Tag: java

Hot on the heels of the announcement of the Apache Jarkarta Project ‘Harmony’ to build an open source implementation of Java, Sun is announcing it’s JDK Collaboration project for Mustang (1.6 release)

Seems like you can only submit bug fixes though, not new features – will this be enough to satisfy the communities requests to open source Java?

Apache have recently announced plans for an Open Source Java project, called ‘Harmony’.

I’m still in two minds about this. There has been a lot of pressure from the community for Sun to open source Java, but so far Sun have resisted. Instead they have implemented some other license agreements whereby they release and allow access to JVM source code early, during development and before the actual release, but as far as I know they are not soliciting community involvement.

I want to see the Java language and platform continue to grow, but right now it still is (not as fast as in the early days, such as in the first couple of years), and I’m not sure if community involvement would enhance the development and evolution of the platform or be harmful to it. For example, I see there could be a danger if anyone was allow to contribute the language would pick up so many different additions that would only be useful for some particular very specific problem (and < 5% of the time), that the language would end up overly bloated with unneeded features (as if it isn't heading that way anyway).

If you need additional features, whats wrong with producing a well documented open source API and release it as a Jar library that anyone can use, if they have a need for it. It doesn’t have to be included as part of the language, and people can choose whether they need it or not?

In the current trend of reducing J2EE application development to the simplest possible form, Plain Ordinary Java Objects, POJOs, the Wicket project is aiming to allow Java developers to build web apps also using POJOs.

Wicket’s feature list is pretty impressive. The approach to development is that the HTML pages are just that, plain HTML, and the Java supporting the pages are POJOs.

From looking throght the examples though, there is still some package and super class hierarchy dependencies on the Wicket framework, so I wouldn’t say that the Java code is pure POJOs, but it does look a lot cleaner than Struts.

I didn’t know Limewire was still around (I had a look at it out of curiousity quite a while ago), but Hans Muller in his blog on the java.net site mentioned that this Java app is picking up a lot of momentum.

It’s currently up to 1.4 million downloads a month – thats a huge number for any app, but its a truely massive number for a Java application. Hans mentions that on download.com, it’s currently 3 times the downloads of WinZip, 10 times RealPlayer, and about 20 times Windows XP Service Pack 2.