Things from Slashdot that seem of interest: 1) Use Parrot. 2) Pity for those who have to write the AWT libraries. 3) Use JamVM. (It's GPL). 4) Harmony was a project to GPL QT (http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/qt.php). 5) Have Sun open-source things to Harmony, or IBM.
Otherwise, mostly positive statements, usual licence stuff and various technical bits (VMs are bad, just compile etc). >From elsewhere: 6) Will generics be truly in the .class files and not just a compiler hack? (I assume we can extend that to many of the compiler hacks. Hard to see the advantage as even if the generics are in there, we wouldn't be able to change things to let you use reflection on generics, varargs etc). --- Questions of my own: 7) Will APR be used to make the JVM easier to port to platforms? 8)For the GUIs, how about using WxWidgets (nee WxWindows) to make it easier to port to the major platforms? Unsure whether it would allow people to plug in their own, or if the recommendation would be to port WxWindows to their platform of choice instead. Their licence appears to be a copy of LGPL with some modification. (http://www.wxwidgets.org/). Wx4j is a wrapper for WxWidgets and maybe they'd be interested in being involved in the AWT layer. 9) Which platforms being targetted? 10) Does the TCK test serialization compatibility, or should that be something that gets created, a large test that compares two J2SEs for compatibility? 11) It would be interesting to see a document with areas for vendor improvement. For example, I assume we can't just put Jakarta ORO behind the java.util.regex package as ORO supports a richer dialect of regular expressions and I assume the dialect is in the spec. 12) I pity the people writing Swing, not the AWT coders :) There's a lot of pure Java in there I imagine, and Sun seem to put an awful lot of work into it. Getting Sun to open-source Swing would be the single-biggest coup that could come of this. Form The Server Side: 13) Consider joeq, a mostly Java JVM (http://joeq.sourceforge.net, LGPL). 14) It's a conspiracy theory by which IBM can own Java! (okay, he later retracted the post but it was worthy of slashdot). -- 15) Last, my favourite is the blog entry that doesn't comment but just provides a link to the homepages of everyone mentioned in the email: http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/2005/05/07/re_who_are_these_people_was_re_open_source_jvm_proposal_on_the_table_at_apache_software_foundation.html Hen
