Thanks Tim!
A few comments, wearing my Apache hat of course (n.b I am an IBM
employee as well).
0) We need to go through the bulk contribution process for this
donation (of course). I have an outstanding to-do on that, which is
to wrap up the bulk contrib rules. I have a proposal that I'll bring
to the dev list later today. Many of the following statements are
made with the assumption that we will work through this process
successfully, and the project will vote to accept this contribution.
1) This is our most significant donation we have received to date (in
terms of maturity and size, I think) and I encourage everyone to
start to play with it. I think of Harmony as a big freight train and
with this contribution builds on the contributions of Dan, Archie,
David, and all the others and the train is starting to move. The
nice thing about a lot of mass is that even small velocities result
in very large momentum :)
2) Combined with the VM that IBM is making available _for
evaluation_, there is a very low barrier to entry to get people up
and working with this. Tim and his team have gone to great pains to
make this easy to evaluate and use (only to be foiled at the end by
our 10MB upload limit on JIRA, hence the two zip files...) so I
encourage everyone to take some time to play, inspect and of course,
ask questions.
3) I want to emphasize that IBM is making their VM available to help
us evaluate and develop this further until we get our own open source
VM underneath it. The VM (for which a link will be posted later) is
not being contributed to the project, or licensed for any other
use. It is proprietary software under a proprietary license. It is
useful to us because it supports the VM/classlibrary interface that
the IBM donation implements, so we can start evaluation and testing
immediately.
4) To that end, I can think of a few things we can do to get started :
a) Get our own current crop of VMs working with it - bootVM and
jcheVM.
b) Help to get Kaffe working with the library interface - see what
it takes to get Kaffe to support this interface as well (if they
want), so we have a more mature free VM that supports the interface.
c) Help to get GNU Classpath supporting the interface (if they
want) so that GNU Classpath can run on the evaluation VM.
The point here is to continue to focus on our cross-project
interoperability and modularity interests, with this important
interface as a starting point. The other benefit of this is that we
can start gump-ing this stuff ASAP :)
I'm sure I'll have things I want to add once I hit "send"...
Yay!
geir
On Nov 8, 2005, at 5:49 AM, Tim Ellison wrote:
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I'm delighted to be able to make a code contribution to the Harmony
project on behalf of IBM. The code comprises a concrete
implementation
of the interface between virtual machine and class library that we
have
been discussing recently, together with a set of core Java
classes. The
aim is to ground the discussion in reality and provide an opportunity
for people to collaborate on enhancements and improvements to actual
code. The Java classes are a subset of Java SE 1.4.2 APIs
sufficient to
run Ant and the Eclipse Java compiler, to provide a basic self-hosting
environment. Some of the types are simply stubs to enable full
recompilation of the Java code. The ZIP also includes HTML
documentation for the VM interface.
I've uploaded the contribution here:
http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HARMONY-14
The expected MD5 sums are:
73ade240df20dec481806130fc8b4875 *Harmony-contribution_Part-1-of-2.zip
bc9117d9b4af113eaf5250883d1ce669 *Harmony-contribution_Part-2-of-2.zip
A number of people were involved with getting the code ready for
contribution (too many to name individually!), and they have done a
fine
job. There is still plently of work to do; for example, we renamed
some
code to "Hy", but some still has a "com.ibm" prefix. The code needs
bringing up to the project goal of supporting 5.0 APIs. It is
targeted
at Windows and Linux on Intel 32-bit machines. Now it is everyone's
code, join in!
In the meantime we are working on making a VM available for download
(under a binary evaluation license) from IBM's DeveloperWorks site
that
implements the class library interface. By getting the VM and
unzipping
into the same directory you can run the contributed code and try out
your changes.
I'll post the URL for the VM download (as soon as I know it) as a
follow-up to this mail -- it could take a couple of days to organize.
Just to avoid confusion, the DeveloperWorks VM not a regular IBM JRE.
It is a VM being made available to enable Harmony development and is
_not_ a contribution.
Regards,
Tim
- --
Tim Ellison ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
IBM Java technology centre, UK.
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--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
