＞It would be great if people would bundle Harmony with stuff (and
plan
＞to do it w/ Geronimo when that time comes), bit it's way out of
scope
＞for *this* project to get into the business of reditributing
software
＞from outside of the ASF.
Hum... I still think there is a minimum distribution effort to be
done
(call
that marketing if you want) to get people to actually test the VM,
as in
the
beginning it might be very, very, very unlikely that absolutely
everything
runs out of the box as replacement for J2SE 5 or 6... So we will
need to
help them try it out.
(Basically, to me some nice IDE + app-server + a few dummy
examples, swing
&
jsf for instance, is the bare minimum to provide as a
demo-micro-distribution-to-test-it-in-reasonable-situations; the
IDE only
might be non-ASF, as I don't think there is a widely accepted ASF-IDE
[well, yes: Eclipse plugins for Tapestry & co. :-); please accept my
apologies if there is one, my point is not selling Eclipse in
particular
but
having an IDE to play with the VM, for instance to test
practically its
debugging interface, and show it to others])
Just think of it in OS terms as a
micro-bootable-live-CD-to-demo-it-actually-works-on-useful-cases
(a stuff
for decision makers). Bundling with 1 or 2 apps we/the ASF did not
write
is
not to be covered by NIH syndrome in my opinion, but rather a way
to prove
it actually works to decision makers. (After all, mono bundles
mono with
monodevelop [or rather monodevelop with mono, I think], and Sun
bundles
Netbeans with J2SE...)
Just the same as if you develop, say, a 'new simulation algorithm for
reaction-diffusion discrete systems, which is "discrete, adaptive"
'[1].
In
order to get credit from ordinary people (who might not be
familiar with
its
technical beauty, right?), even if the scope of this project is on
soft
architecture and math analysis, you might have to provide
scientifically
uninteresting display that it works... (Spiraling pattern for
simplified
models of myocardium cells electrophysiology: that is, simulation of
cardiac
arrhythmia in dummy demo-only situation, so here the mystery of
what it is
ends here [2])
That is, with some 'out of scope' effort you get images for the
layman to
be
impressed...
To come back to more soft-only concerns, IMHO providing
distributors with
the minimum tool they need to polish the VM-to-VM discrepancies and
external
developers the minimum tools they need to test their soft on the
Harmony
VM
(and get a chance to actually do something - not just: 'it does
not work'
-
if it does not work the way they planned it) might be a big ROI,
comparatively small effort.
A VM without the bare minimum support tools might appear a bit
useless to
many people (and also impractical to test with an ergonomic, long-
lasting
experience of beautiful-looking piece of software). If you take,
say, the
FreeBSD case, you don't have much choice for instance for the VM
you use
with your favorite IDE, so that ipso facto you stick with the VM
you get
in
stock (because the other VMs might be good, but if it's a
nightmare to
reconfigure it all to use your VM of choice with your favorite
IDE...),
just
like IE sticks with many win$ users.
As a use case, if I want to test a piece of software, well I would
like it
to be kind of "download it and play".
Regards,
RB
[1] Sorry I take examples of my own... (Well, the research I once
did)
[2] It was so simplified it was meaningless in my opinion, but I
got my
credits with it...
-----Original Message-----
From: Geir Magnusson Jr. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2005 8:58 PM
To: harmony-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: [arch] VM Candidate : JikesRVM
http://jikesrvm.sourceforge.net/
On May 22, 2005, at 9:27 PM, Renaud BECHADE wrote:
＞ No. Why would we do this?
People tend to be lazy. If they have a bundle with one VM, then
they will
use that VM, for most of them, IMHO. I seriously doubt we can have
people
trust an alternative VM if it is not a piece of cake (sort of "with
a one
liner on the console you are started") to develop with it, and as
it is
unlikely it will support everything perfectly at the beginning (to
convince
you let us consider running .NET soft on a Linux/Mono machine, or
XSP code
on a FreeBSD/mono machine - sometimes it crashes badly, or again
freeware
support of Flash swf, all of which can have slightly strange
behaviors
sometimes, if compared with commercial equivalents, so that a
development
that is not started /from the beginning/ with them might get into
troubles)
there will be some intensive testing to do on real applications,
which might
involve some patches on "must-have" packages such as Eclipse / J2EE
etc.
(including strategies as simple as repackaging with a bit less
modules to
have it actually run because some funny class is not here)
It would be great if people would bundle Harmony with stuff (and plan
to do it w/ Geronimo when that time comes), bit it's way out of scope
for *this* project to get into the business of reditributing software
from outside of the ASF.
geir
RB
-----Original Message-----
From: Geir Magnusson Jr. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, May 20, 2005 7:38 PM
To: harmony-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: [arch] VM Candidate : JikesRVM http://
jikesrvm.sourceforge.net/ <http://jikesrvm.sourceforge.net/>
On May 19, 2005, at 10:29 PM, Renaud BECHADE wrote:
Another point that is unrelated, but what about the "packaging" of
the VM?
Do we plan to release it with say Eclipse + Server (JSF + IDE +
object DB or
O/R mapping + HSQL DB)? (IMHO this is good way to legitimate it)
No. Why would we do this?
We want our JRE or JDK to be an alternative to the existing JREs and
JDKs w/o having people worry about all the cruft.
If you had an interest in bundling for some reason, you could of
course take the thing and do that elsewhere (or start a separate
project here if there was enough support and a decent rationale...)
geir
--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
