Sven de Marothy wrote:
I really don't view it that way. I view it as 'Is it worth spending effort on this?'.
I understand where Geir is coming from here: even more important then the implementation, one of Harmony objectives is to involve different groups as well as commercial companies, to define a modular architecture for a J2SE implementation. It could even be that a Harmony VM would be incorporated with Sun's classlibraries to create a product by some comercial vendor that could lawfully do that. In this view, it would be important to have a VM-library interface that could accomplish that.
But I mostly agree with Sven: if we're going to support plugging different libraries, we must start from somewere that is available and documented (Classpath has such a beast) and then work with the interested parties to expand that. For us to include the existing (non documented/proprietary) Sun interface it would have to be contributed by Sun into the discussion.
This could be a good way of starting to propose a Sun involvement. If this proves a good idea it could even turn into a JCP spec as it was suggested. If Sun is not interested, I don't see any reason to invest effort in doing it, since it will have no pratical value.
I think it is more probable that IBM or other Sun licensee that wants to use Sun's class libraries will just do the effort in order for then to use the existing library, and if legally possble, contribute that back. Without Sun's involvement, that's the best we could hope for.
And if we want a pluggable infrastructure, we would still be better off starting from Classpath, since it already plugs into many VMs, while Sun's library seams to not have this advantage to start with. Better change one than many :-)
Bruno.
/Sven
-- Bruno. ______________________________________________________________________ Bruno Peres Ferreira de Souza Brazil's JavaMan http://www.javaman.com.br bruno at javaman.com.br if I fail, if I succeed, at least I live as I believe
