On Nov 22, 3:25 pm, Weiqi Gao <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > About removing stale content from the JRE, how about let those people > and companies *pay* to keep their favorite frameworks in the JRE, and > start to remove the least favorite feature every month. <polemic> Well, just to stir the mixture: there's nothing from stopping any developer or group of developers from shipping a fork of the JRE which removes features they don't want. You just can't call it Java, and would probably need to be very careful with how you present it and market it to avoid trademark issues. There are three (+?) implementations (OpenJDK, GNU Classpath and Apache Harmony), under three different licenses, from which one could choose. I'm not sure what the downside to this would be. Let's say that one was careful enough to avoid a lawsuit regarding license or trademark. The main issues would seem to be first, how to get enough financial resources to back development, testing, hosting and releases, and second, how to manage a forked community.
Sure, it would break some apps, but they could stick with the standard JRE. A lot of apps wouldn't be affected if, say, CORBA was removed from the stack. People talk about "Java.next" as if it were all about the language, but I think as much thought needs to put into how the libraries are developed, maintained, deprecated and replaced, and what this means when talking about a set of "framework" libraries such as the JRE aims to be. It seems just wrong that we have APIs in the JRE which even the original authors admit were designed and implemented under duress and short time schedules (think: AWT, Swing) or which are functional but widely unpopular (logging, preferences). Personally, I'd prefer a much smaller core framework and a well-design modular system for extending it, perhaps with a "profiles" approach to shipping the core and subsets of libraries together. The code is all there, and the IDEs and related developer tools are good enough that you could actually refactor the framework libraries and popular open-source libraries and apps at the same time, making sure that at least a number of popular third-party software continue to work out of the box. </polemic> Patrick --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
