Contributing writer: Thomas Fitzsimmons
At the 2006 JavaOne conference, Sun announced plans to open source Java. This wasn’t exactly a surprise to those of us working on Java at Red Hat, given that there had been rumblings before. But this was a real announcement. We were immediately interested in learning exactly which license Sun would choose. Even if it was a legitimate open source license, it still might not allow us to combine our code with Sun’s.
We have been working on free Java for many years–most particularly through gcj, a project started at Cygnus in 1998 by a developer named Per Bothner. Gcj has been steadily improving over the years, but still wasn’t fully Java-compatible, partly because we couldn’t get permission to run the official Java compatibility test suite. We had also been working on GNU Classpath, which is GNU’s free replacement for the core Java class libraries from Sun. We were very curious to see the “official version.” » Read more
Dev Fu focuses on the fresh and free OpenJDK 6 in Fedora 9 (Sulphur) because this is great news for developers. Especially developers who want to use the best software because it’s free and it doesn’t suck. However, there is much more of interest for developers than just OpenJDK:
For a good general overview of Fedora 9, read Fedora Project Leader Paul W. Frields article in Red Hat Magazine, “Fedora 9: Get yours and get involved“. The full feature list for Fedora 9 is also a good read.
The first morning of JavaOne was a great serendipitous event. How often does something fall into place like this: I saw Barton George, who looks after Sun’s relationships with Linux communities, and we decided to cook up a podcast about OpenJDK 6 in Fedora 9. As we walked to the recording room, I commented that it would be great if we could get Tom Fitzsimmons, too. Not two beats later, we rounded a corner, and there stood Tom with Patrick Macdonald. Of course they were available and happy to record with us, and away we went.
Hear Barton (and a little bit of me) interview Tom and Patrick about the journey of OpenJDK and IcedTea: OGG and MP3
Patrick Macdonald, Tom Fitzsimmons (kneeling), and Karsten Wade. Photo: Barton George from this post The discussion covered the history of making a 100% free and open source runtime in Fedora from the initial Java open source code, which itself was 96% of a complete and self-building JDK. This remaining 4% was filled with components from GNU Classpath by the IcedTea team. The term “IcedTea” came from the package name used because, at that time, Fedora didn’t have a trademark license to use “OpenJDK”. Of the GNU Classpath code used, some if it ended up completing the circle to be included in OpenJDK. Based on relationships made at FOSDEM 2007, the team from Fedora/Red Hat were able to work with folks from Sun and other places to do work in the community in advance of resolving the remaining 4%, and do it in a way that could be more easily folded into OpenJDK. What is riveting about this story is the speed and quality of the outcome that is clearly due to the open source methodology used. By opening all the code that they could, Sun made it possible for others to fill the gaps Sun could not immediately fill. By working closely throughout that process, all of the open source code was used and tested in the community. Sun had time to choose the right license so the code could be merged. If Sun had waited until they could open all the code, we would have lost an entire year of development (at least.) Now that OpenJDK 6 is available in EPEL 5 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, it is only a matter of time before it gets certified to appear in an update. This is being worked on by Keith Seitz and Mark Wielaard, who have “not many” test suites to complete to be ready to pass the TCK. Once that is done, the implementation can be called “Java compliant”, which is an important step to being ready for an Enterprise Linux 5.x update. Listen to the audio to get all the details, and check out Barton’s blog entry for his viewpoint.
At the JBoss booth at JavaOne 2008, I spoke with RichFaces developer Alexander Smirnov (OGG, MP3.) Alexander is the founder of the Ajax4jsf project, which he started as a personal side effort. It grew out of his interest in JSF and was originally run as a stand alone, self-hosted project.
As he developed Ajax4jsf, Alexander began working with the MyFaces community, and started communicating more with the larger JSF community. He moved the project to SourceForge at the suggestion of RichFaces lead developer Sergey Smirnov (no relation.) Exadel began developing the RichFaces JSF components library and Alexander joined the project as a framework background developer.
At the time it moved to java.net, Ajax4jsf had grown more useful when integrated with the RichFaces component library. RichFaces, however, was still not open source. The combined projects came to the attention of JBoss, which contracted with Exadel to open source both projects as JBoss projects. These were recently combined into a single project under the RichFaces name, available through JBoss.org. (RichFaces is combined with the JBoss Tools Eclipse-based developer environment to make up the JBoss Developer Studio subscription offering.)
Current activity for the RichFaces project includes a focus on building RichFaces functionality within JBoss Portlet Bridge. JBoss Portlet Bridge implements JSR-301 to provide support for not only JSF running in a portal, but also Seam and RichFaces.
Joining forces with JBoss has brought significantly more usage, ten times or more in terms of downloads. In particular, Alexander says there is an obvious increase in forum questions and discussions. In terms of attracting contributors, there are currently very few code contributions from the community outside of Exadel and JBoss. Alexander and Sergey describe the development process for the RichFaces team as being structured with a well-oiled process, which creates a higher barrier of entry for people outside of the team. As early ways to bring in external contributors, there are current needs for testing, defining future requirements, and requesting features and enhancements.
For the future roadmap of RichFaces, Alexander says that the next step is toward semantic web technologies.
This will be my last post from JavaOne this year–I’m headed back home. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of the JBoss crew is. They’re here through Friday to bring you more packed mini-sessions at the Pavilion booth and a few more technical sessions.
Here’s the schedule for the rest of the week and another personal recommendation. » Read more
Gavin King’s packed Web Beans technical session
Monday’s CommunityOne crowd was manageable and pretty much what I expected. Tuesday’s crowd was larger, but I walked straight into the technical sessions without a problem. This morning I stepped outside for a few minutes, and when I came back in, there was a line stretching across the entire large hallway and down an adjacent narrow one. Then I realized that was the line I wanted to be in.
At the end of that long (but quickly moving) line, Gavin King from JBoss spoke to a standing-room-only crowd about the basics of Web Beans. The presentation included a lot of example code, stepping everyone through binding types, deployment types, producer methods, and more.
If you’re interested in hearing Gavin yourself, we have a video interview of him talking about Web Beans. » Read more
This afternoon I caught a few minutes with Ivelin Ivanov, a lead developer on the Mobicents project. Mobicents is the first certified open source platform for developing and deploying JSLEE applications.
This audiocast is available from the JBoss.org podcast channel, in OGG and MP3 formats.
Today was the first official day of JavaOne. I visited a couple of non-JBoss sessions that sounded really interesting, and they were–so now I share them with you. The first is about an improved web recommendation system, and the second is for improving collaboration with your off-site coworkers.
But first, if you’re here with us…
Come visit us at the JBoss booth in the Pavilion. We’re straight back and on the right when you come through the door. Every day, we’re holding 15-minute mini-sessions in the booth on the hour. You can meet the core developers and ask your questions in person. We’ve also got JBoss t-shirts and free entitlements of JBoss Developer Studio.
Also, the JBoss technical sessions are all still ahead of us. So if you’re here at JavaOne, be sure to check them out. If you’re not, keep reading this week to hear more about what’s going on.
What’s funny is, the instructions are shorter than the title of this post.
su -c "rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-2.noarch.rpm"
su -c "yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk"
Read more about how to use EPEL. Fedora EPEL is a community run project to bring Fedora packages to Enterprise Linux users when the package is not included by Red Hat in an Enterprise Linux release. Read more on the Fedora EPEL wiki pages, including links to package view (i386, x86_64, ppc) per EPEL version (4, 5 to correspond with Enterprise Linux versions.)
This week Red Hat Magazine is in San Francisco to bring you to JavaOne. (Or to join you if you’re here too!) I call it day -1 because JavaOne itself hasn’t officially started yet. Today things kicked off with CommunityOne, the “free and open developer conference,” featuring a good variety of sessions and representations from across the open source spectrum. It also included beanbags in front of Star Wars on continuous loop and human hamster balls–never let it be said that developers don’t like to have fun. » Read more
