It's nice to see this finally come to market.

It's using the Apache Harmony class library, so I'm happy to have played a small part in seeing this come to light.

Maybe Google will send me a phone :)

From the blog of Sun's Mike Dillon :

To be clear, Sun = FOSS. We have transformed our company and aligned it around the belief that giving away our technology and investing in related communities will create greater adoption of our intellectual property and ultimately redound to the benefit of our shareholders, customers and the open source community. When it comes to Sun's commitment to open source - "the horse is out of the barn". Not only that, it's also had foals.

Be careful where you step. The horse seems to have left other things around. As long as it can remain hidden behind Sun's NDA requirements and the FSF peeps continue to remain complacent, maybe you won't smell it either.

Hopefully they won't destroy Java in the process just to hit their numbers for a quarter or two.

John Gage, who among many other things is the fondly-thought-of "voice of JavaOne" has left Sun for greener pastures. Pardon the pun.

I guess it's now "was the voice of". John, we'll miss you.

This post is a RFP - "Request for People".

I've been meaning to announce that I've joined a new startup, 10gen. I'll write more about the change later. The upshot of 10gen should be well explained on the site (and if not, let me know so I can fix it), but in brief, we're developing a "platform" for what is very loosely called "cloud computing". I say "loosely", because the term encompasses a very broad range of technology and services, from basic grid computing to AWS to AppEngine to SalesForce to EngineYard to ... I'm working with some very smart and accomplished people (ignore the guy at the bottom of the page) and I'm lucky - we appear to all share the same views on code, agility, process, technology, product, etc.

What we're building is ambitious - an application server and a database that are designed for infinite scalability. In addition, we're building developer tooling, application libraries, and management infrastructure to help people develop, debug and deploy applications to said scalable application platform. A similar example is Google's AppEngine - it's an app server with a kind of database to which you can write applications, and those apps will run across the Google's resource grid. The 10gen platform is an app server with an object database (keep reading :), and this platform will run across a variety of resource grids - you can run it on Amazon's AWS, across standard managed hosting providers like Rackspace etc (even multiple ones, for geo and vendor diversity), or even run on your internal computing resources.

A key feature of our platform is that we're multi-language. We're focused on Javascript and Ruby at the moment for writing applications, but we have no religious or political convictions here - we're interested in supporting languages that people want to work on. (We are also dedicated to making such languages and related frameworks run fast.) The constraint is that we think that to get internet scalability, standard programming models have to change a little - you can't just toss a LAMP stack or Java EE server onto AWS and expect infinite scalability. While the benefits of AWS are clear - zero capex for infrastructure, dynamic resource availability, reduced operations personnel costs - you still have whatever scalability limitations you started with in your LAMP stack or Java EE server. Don't get me wrong - this isn't a ding on LAMP, EE, or AWS but just a recognition of the challenges we're all facing with our standard tools.

On the database side, yes Virginia, it's an object database. When I first heard this, I had what I imagine is the standard reaction by people that have only used RDBMSs - "huh?". But after playing with it, and thinking about the problem space, I'm convinced that this kind of database architecture is not only nice, but required. Clearly Google and Amazon think so too as their data stores are either object stores or tuple stores. Sure, you can run a RDBMS on at Amazon, but that's just as scalable as your current config. It's clear that an ODBMS isn't going to be the right database for all applications, but I think that what we have is very "fit for purpose", and the RDBMS isn't the right database for all applications either. (Think of how much time we all spend as programmers trying to deal with the RDBMS in a sane way via JPA, Hibernate, iBatis, JDO, Linq, ActiveRecord, ActiveTable, Django, SQLAlchemy, Storm, DataMapper, DataXtend, etc)

Anyway, we're looking for really good people to join the team. We're focused on hiring in our New York office on 20th Street in what is colloquially known as "Silicon Alley", but I'll consider other arrangements. We have some really big and interesting problems to solve, and we need people of all experience levels and backgrounds. The app server is written in Java, and the database in C++. There are all sorts of scalability, grid and management issues to solve. Our application libraries and frameworks are written in Java, Javascript and Ruby. We want to build tooling for Eclipse. We're going to be open sourcing major parts of our codebase. I need core appserver and db engineers, application library and framework engineers, Ruby and Ruby on Rails engineers, Eclipse plugin engineers, QA engineers, QA technicians, technical writers, community leaders and managers, developer relationship managers, etc. The list goes one. I could formally list the job specs, but I think that if you've read this far, our time would be better spent talking. Just drop me a mail at geir at 10gen dot com. If you have my phone number, call me.

This is an exhilarating, terrifying space with exhilarating, terrifying problems to solve, and we have an opportunity to make a real impact. Life is too short to be bored :)

Doug Lea pointed out (in a closed forum, but knowing Doug, I don't think he'll be upset w/ me saying this in public) that there's widespread misconception in the industry about TCKs - that they are necessarily hard and difficult beasts to create. Example, from Frank at Artima :

But developing and maintaining a good TCK is a huge task, and one few open-source projects are accustomed to.

I think that Eclipse has 30k+ tests. Apache Harmony has a massive pile. GNU Classpath has something like 20k. There are tons in Apache Commons. Clearly it can be done. A TCK is really just a thorough (and if you've used them, not always so thorough) pile of unit tests :)

The Reg is reporting that Hans Muller left Sun for Adobe. Unfortunate, given Sun's apparent move of going "all in" in this area with the Java FX strategery. (Hey, it was the main subject of the JavaOne opening keynote two years running...)

While I'm confident that Sun still has enough remaining technical chops to deliver the core technology - some of the smartest people I know work there, and work on this - I think that Sun needs to modify it's DNA and get people that not only understand how to market to the development and design community, but also create tooling for designers as Adobe (clearly) and Microsoft (to some degree) - the two companies that Sun has decided to take on, head on - have at least a decade head start on them. Hint I - this will require investing heavily now, rather than trying to limp by on the cheap. Hint II - another walled-garden OSS community ain't gonna cut it because the best OSS tooling are tools that developers built for themselves. (Eclipse, NetBeans (sorta), gcc, ant, etc...). Designers don't build these kinds of tools for themselves.

This reminds me - given the sheer number and quality of Java engineering defections (I've lost track of the world-class rockstars that are just at Google, let alone Azul, etc)... I worry about the effect this will have on Sun's ability to deliver the next rev of Java SE...

This amazingly off-the-mark article appeared in The Register yesterday. Dalibor just joined Sun and surely is still getting his bearings and has never participated in the JCP and it's possible he was misquoted by Gavin. As a friend of Dalibor, I've suggested to him that he should get it corrected. As the Apache Software Foundation representative to the JCP EC, I sent the following to the Sun EC reps and chair of the PMO trying to figure out what Sun is up to here :

Patrick, Danny, Calinel :

Given that fact that the statements contained in

    http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/05/14/jcp_individual_representation/

are given by a Sun employee identifying himself in his job role, can I assume that Sun is interested in taking this discussion public? I think that is a really healthy approach. I think there is confusion about the basic facts and I think clarification will be useful for the community as a whole.

I think I'll wait to see what Sun's intention is here before addressing some of the problems in the article. After all, it could be a just a huge misunderstanding. Why do I care? Because openness, transparency and the equitable "rule of law" is inherent in the ASF's struggle in securing an equitable Java SE TCK license from Sun.

Hopefully Sun will allow me to publish their answer. Not being able to would be supportive of "A culture favoring closed-door meetings" :)

I wonder why...

Read here

Also here : http://java.dzone.com/news/glassfish-v3-major-win-osgi

At J1, at the general session. No clue yet what the theme for the year is, despite Rich Green being halfway into his pitch. Currently watching an AMZN Kindle demo. Maybe they'll throw a few from the stage.

Nice evening last night. Dinner w/ Simon and Danese in North Beach. Found out that SF natives store their car keys in the trunk keyhole when at dinner. That wouldn't work in NYC. Hard to imagine why they bother locking them in the first place. Saw friends at OpenSolaris launch party (part 1) at Jillian's and then evening of debauchery w/ friends at HoS courtesy of RedMonk. Thanks guys, and apologies again for my tardiness, James.

Just got an update... cool.

The ASF has been nominated for the JCP Member of the Year. Thanks to the JCP community for valuing our contributions in the last year.

I had a few free minutes and was using the session builder to put together a schedule for JavaOne. Seems to work much better this year for some reasons. Anyway, it's clear that Sun and Azul settled their lawsuit - there are lots of Azul presenters on cool subjects, and good to see proliferation of non-Java language talks.

I did the export of the schedule to .ics and imported to iCal. Worked like a charm. Only problem is that it only was my sessions, and not the general ones, like the general sessions, pavilion hours, lunch, coffee breaks, and after hours activities. Silly.

Currently down in Brasil for FISL (it's over) and some business-related work in Sao Paulo. FISL was a great time - the talk went well, and it was nice to see people I know down here, as well as some of my friends from Sun. I won't name names. They all were very kind, open and welcoming, including me in their social activities, and I got to know many of them better. Really a smart and talented bunch. Thanks. I really do appreciate it.

I also got to spend time with Ean Schuessler and his brother Eric, who also was here. When Bruno told me "Hey, Ean has a brother! He's bigger and crazier than Ean is!" I knew that things were going to be more interesting than usual. It was great meeting Eric. These two guys are insanely talented, and inspired at a level that is indescribable.

I have two photo's to share. The first comes from a restaurant we went to sat night, one that specialized in filet mignon, where "specialized" refers to the various ways they cook it. Start with "Chicken-Fried" :

Yes, there's a piece of steak in there - and not a bad one. (Forget the bed of pasta it's one...) That was followed by "filet mignon parmesian", then w/ garlic, then we a yellow-ish cheese, then a white-ish cheese, then madiera, and then something else I forgot. All good, but odd :)

Here's another pic from the gym at my current hotel - it's SP in the evening, clouds and rain :

http://robilad.livejournal.com/30463.html

Congrats, my friend!

Hey, can I get on the OpenJDK governing board? Would be good to have some loyal opposition on it :)

I saw that Sun announced that they'd port Java ME to the iPhone.

Why they are doing ME rather than SE? SE should run just fine. :) I mean, Google has Android running on phones, and Sun themselves had SE (or most of it - I don't remember) running on a phone last year? the year before?

11 WARN [main] openjpa.Runtime - The property named "openjpa.Id" was not recognized and will be ignored, although the name closely matches a valid property called "openjpa.Id".

Jim Hurley has left Sun. (Sorry about the link to a response to Jim's announcement on the Apache River mail list, but I couldn't find the original post...)

I met Jim when helping the JINI community move to the ASF. He's a really nice guy and a great engineer. He told me where he's going, but I don't know if I can say :) I wish him well - this is a loss for Sun.

Laurie Tolson, VP of All Things Java at Sun, has now left the company. I know Laurie through various open source Java things, including the ongoing war battles over the Java SE TCK. I have great respect for her, and wish her the best at her new job.

(Hey, Rich... these are the kind of people you need to keep...)

My friend Tom Marble is leaving Sun.

Tom and I have been doing hand-to-hand combat over 'free' Java, open source Java, Apache's relationship with Sun, the TCK license battle for years now. He's a worthy opponent and I really respect him. His new things sounds great, and I can't wait until he reveals more publicly.

Every now and then I wake up to good news. Tim Ellison announced on the Apache Harmony list that the new IBM JDK 6 has been released, and it contains code from Apache Harmony!

I thought you'd be interested to know that IBM has released the "IBM Java SDK version 6" for general availability today [1]. The Java SDK is released across various combinations of Windows, AIX, z/OS, and Linux on IA32, AMD64/EM64T, Power32 & 64, and zSeries 31 & 64 processors. Of particular note is that this version of the IBM Java SDK contains a significant amount of Apache Harmony class library code, as developed by a number of people on this list. So thank you, everyone, for the hard work in implementing, testing and delivering production quality code. Of course, IBM's Java SDK v6 has passed the Java SE JCK compliance test suite, is installed on numerous IBM systems, and forms the basis of literally hundreds of IBM products, many used in mission-critical environments. I think this is a very exciting achievement.

The Java Trap

And while you are pondering the idea of not paying, don't forget Sun does aggressively defend their intellectual property in court...

Re Sun changing their ticker from SUNW to JAVA, Sam Ruby's blog had a subtle dig at Sun, crossing out the "C" in "JCP", hinting that by [ab]using the Java trademark in this way, Sun was removing the Community from the ecosystem.

Now, while I agree with Sam's assessment, I don't think that the "C" needs to be removed from "JCP". Now, it simply stands for "Customer".

(Guest blog by Evil Geir)

I think this is brilliant, and now I understand completely what Rich is doing. My alter-ego, Good Geir - who does Apache Harmony - is somewhat bewildered. Good Geir presumes that this is the logical follow-on to the secretly successful but sadly misunderstood "Java Desktop System" product strategy, logically extending it now to the whole company. However, I think he's wrong - it makes perfect sense in the spirit of "go big, or go home". I can't imagine what Sun's partners in the Java ecosystem are going to do, but clearly Rich doesn't care.

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/java_is_everywhere

(I do wonder if they'll be spinning off their server and microelectronics businesses now that they've finally settled on a business plan.)

UPDATE : This blog was referenced on http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/blogs_on_sun_s_new, but I think that the author missed my point - if the business objective is to unwind the notion of Java as a collaborative ecosystem, and turn it into a one-company product (like .NET), then this *is* a brilliant move. The whole fight with Apache - shafting a long-time Java supporter and valued community member by Sun ignoring their JSPA obligations and public promises for the stated purpose of defending revenue - makes perfect sense in this light. Community be damned, there's revenue here somewhere... As my good-twin Good Geir suggested, just change the "C" in JCP to mean "Customer".

I spent a few days with Brian and other smart friends last week, and he had the perfect analogy for how we got into the mess we did regarding concurrency in Java - we "frog-boiled" our way into it.

So, by the power vested in my by the encouragement of Bruce Eckel, I hereby challenge Brian to... blog about it. Please? :)

For anyone that noticed, I had to cancel my Harmony talk at OSCON due to some family issues - I need to stay as close to home as possible. That said, Harmony is alive and well :)

I was looking forward to attending this year and hearing how OpenJDK is going, community-wise... it's been slow going, but now that that they've had over a year to get it together, I was curious where they were. I'm hoping that Mark still doesn't claim that Apache community governance is complicated :)

As part of my ongoing quest to get control of my personal inbox, I ran into this from fellow Harmony cohort Tim Ellison :

http://tellison.blogspot.com/2007/06/gnu-forks-openjdk-despite-claims-to.html

I was the one asking Tom about closing down the other projects, as Tom thought it a good thing to only have one implementation.

I can't wait to see how this works out. If IcedTea accepts contributions from others, how are they going to contribute to OpenJDK? Maybe they'll force their contributors to hand over copyright...

"We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities - we have no intention of holding anything back, or pulling patent nonsense."

Brother Dalibor in his recent blog entry on his thoughts related to is appointment to the interim governing board of Sun's OpenJDK project (congrats!) said a few things I found worth comment :

I don't work for Sun, IBM, Oracle or any other company making their money with Java, so my influence on the business decisions made by any one of them is going to be limited by their willingness to listen to outside opinions.

I don't understand. OpenJDK is all about one company (Sun) and their business decisions to try and make money with Java. IBM contributed to an open source java implementation - Apache Harmony - long before Sun ever seriously thought about doing so, so I'm not really sure how IBM or Oracle fit into this. You're going to need to influence Sun. You then continue :

I'd like to see OpenJDK rapidly evolve into something larger, and getting that right will be easier to do with all the interested parties involved inside the project, rather than waiting outside it - which is why it is so important to me to get the runtime projects like the Classpath VMs, for example, and GNU Classpath, to become closely associated with OpenJDK (and eventually Apache Harmony & J9 as GPLv3 happens) as soon as possible,

I sorta got the impression that GCJ, Kaffe and GNU Classpath were just going to close up shop because OpenJDK is here ;) Or is that only Red Hat-led projects? Seriously, I'd like to see this too, but I'm not sure how "closely associated" Apache Harmony will get to Open JDK simply because of licensing and IP assignment problems. I guess one way is to try the path we wanted to go down with Harmony, namely look for architectural alignment with things like modularity.

Other ways? Well, a good first step would be to get rid of the requirement that all copyright is held (jointly or otherwise) by Sun, either by abandoning the requirement, or putting it in the hands of a trusted, independent third party. (Sun is having a few problems regarding IP management these days...) That may give you a big shot of credibility with the above mentioned IBMs and Oracles of the world, as that would help level the playing field - they could theoretically participate in the project as peers, rather than simply providing Sun with re-licenseable technology for free. An alternative would be to dual- or re-license the codebase under something commercially useful, like CDDL, CPL, EPL or such to give symmetrical freedom to users, rather than have Sun as the only participant with commercial freedom. (BTW, J9 is a VM owned by IBM, and not available under an open source license, so i don't quite know why it's included above).

Putting that aside, maybe a good first step of the Interim Government would be to explain exactly what the OpenJDK codebase is (it's not Java SE 6 and there is no such thing as Java SE 7) and who can use it and when as an implementation of Java. That should keep you occupied for a while ;)

I was reading the latest blog entry from Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun. I really admire the guy, and generally find him insightful and very smart.

However, the blog had a really confused perspective on corporate threats to open source, as well as a bit of confusion regarding their OpenJDK project. Re OpenJDK :

We've seen Java's acceptance made permanent, on servers and desktops and mobile phones and set tops, in no small part due to our decision to use the GPL license (to simplify the Linux/Java combination on consumer devices and industrial applications).

"in no small part"? How about, "in no part whatsoever"? Despite claims to the contrary, Sun actually hasn't released all the source to Java SE, and for the source they did release, it's not of any known version of Java, nor can it be called Java or used as Java. it's seed code for the not-yet-proposed Java SE 7 JSR, a JSR nowhere to be found yet. If the code was complete, you couldn't test it because there's no TCK out there that will let you ship the tested code under an open source license because of field of use restrictions on the shipped code placed there by Sun.

He does, IMO, get it right in the end :

All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach.

Perfect. Now can the ASF have a TCK license that's compatible with "open standards and open source software"? Please?

James Gosling :

And the Apache folks were very angry at us for picking GPL. But we had to pick something. If we'd picked the Apache license, the GPL crowd would be upset with us.

No, Apache isn't "angry" - it's Sun's IP and they can license it as they choose. We believe that people should have the freedom to license their own IP as they see fit. (That's not what the GPL says, btw).

Also, lets be clear - Sun has already picked more than one license. Sun picked the GPL+ClasspathException for the OpenJDK project, but since Sun will maintain copyright over the whole codebase, Sun will be re-licensing the codebase under other licenses for their customers and other purposes. So, Sun could *also* license under the Apache License as well and not invoke the wrath of the "GPL crowd". I'm guessing, rather, that Sun simply doesn't want to because it loses control.

At J1. Rich Green just announced option #1 of my three guesses on the messaging around the JCK.

I was wrong. The description is from here :

Sun is going to make it easy to certify the compatibility of implementations based on OpenJDK code by granting access to the Java SE TCKs under a special license, and that in turn will help safeguard the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" compatibility promise for everyone. The details are still being worked out, but we're committed to compatibility for Java technology as free software.

Good for OpenJDK, but I don't really know what this means. Since OpenJDK isn't actually Java SE 6, it's a future version of Java (like SE 7), I suppose we aren't going to see it for a while.

I'm on the plane to JavaOne, thinking about what we'll hear over the next week. So far, there's been no response from Sun to Apache's open letter (except the weird blog from "jacki", whoever she is...). But there are plenty of rumors about the a JCK announcement by Sun on Tuesday, probably at the keynote. I'm really bad at prediction, so I hate writing something like this, but I'm in the back of a 767 (no, not EOS) and really bored, so here goes.

It's a strange thing, to mention the JCK in a keynote. It's software that 99.999% of all Java developers really don't care about. They just care about having compatible, performant Java. In the Harmony project, that's what we're trying to do, but the license terms under which Sun is offering the JCK are simply unacceptable.

The rumor is that Sun will offer the JCK as open source software. While that would be great, I suspect it won't actually address the problem - I don't believe it means what people are interpreting it to mean :

Current JCKs are available under an open source license, such that using the software as-is tests compatibility, and if passed, bestows all necessary IP as mandated by the JSPA.

Why don't I believe this? Because I can't believe that Sun would have forced the ASF into the open letter with all the negative consequences when they intended to not only comply with the terms of the JSPA as the ASF is requesting, and then go a step further and put the software under an open source license, which would be nice, but not actually a request from the ASF. Why would they do this now? If they had planned this, why wouldn't they have given the ASF a license without the FOU that violates the JSPA - just like every other TCK license the ASF has received from Sun - and then followed up with the open source announcement at JavaOne? They'd be heros to the FLOSS crowd. They'd be heros to me! Now, they find themselves in a public battle with a charity.

So, while the above would be great, I'm guessing it isn't going to happen. I could be totally wrong - it's happened before, more times than I care to admit. But suppose I'm right - what might happen? Here are a few guesses :

1. "It's not whether but when!" - In the same spirit of their "open source Java" announcement, they will announce that the JCK will be open source, in some future version, which may or may not be defined at the time of announcement. I'm guessing Java SE 7 is safe for them - that will be 2009 if history is any guide - which will be time enough for the organization to purge itself of the paranoid elements driving the current rift with the ASF, or if not, to prove the rational POV to be correct - that Harmony isn't any more a risk to Sun's business than OpenJDK is, and that more compatible, open source Java makes the Java ecosystem stronger, which makes Sun's value proposition to their customers even stronger. If I were Jonathan Schwartz, I'd be mighty worried about MSFT distributing a free, open source, cross platform .NET VM. But then again, that's the long view, and Sun seems to be rather quarter-to-quarter focused these days.
2. "The 'Look Ma! No IP!'" - This one is to release the source to the JCK under an open source license but not have it be the official JCK, in the same way that lots of Apache technologies like Tomcat and the XML stuff were the code that went into the RI of Sun's specs, but wasn't officially the RI. This will satisfy the FLOSS crowd, as they don't care about being compatible, and are living under the delusion that they have all necessary IP for an implementation. This will also confuse people quite a bit, as they won't realize that it doesn't solve the problem. Why doesn't it solve the problem? Because in this model, the JCK isn't actually open source - just some test suite that's part of the JCK. By definition, free software and open source software don't have field of use restrictions.
3. "The Flying Stallman" - This option is a bit weirder and also interesting. Imagine if Sun put the source of the JCK tests under the GPL, and then additionally had the JCK license allow FOU-less use on GPL-ed codebases. Note that this JCK license would violate the JSPA in the same way that the current JCK license does, as it doesn't remove the problematic element. It's also interesting as I'd hazard a guess that the FLOSS crowd would stand and salute even thought it's an ironic and clever example of a commercial entity leveraging the restrictions (aka "Freedoms"(TM)) of the GPL for commercial control or advantage. It's a tried and true business model (MySQL, OpenJPA, JBoss, OpenOffice) that works just fine, btw. Would they try something as nutty as this? Well, given Sun's confusion over their current compliance with the JSPA, who knows... it seems that the sky's the limit. Would it work? (With "work" defined as "placate the FLOSS crowd while calming Sun's misguided fears about Harmony") Maybe. I think it depends on the wording. Suppose someone had a project where one entity holds all copyright (like Sun does with OpenJPA). That entity could dual license under both the GPL and something else, but I suppose Sun could argue that their IP doesn't flow to the software under the other license (in violation of the JSPA).

I'll guess it's the first one. It is years away and therefore doesn't need to be sold internally very much....

I'm not sure if I can think of any other possibilities, except one - Sun figures out that moving forward with the ASF is more valuable over the long term than pointlessly trying to protect "make or break the quarter" revenue by taking a legal position that puts the legitimacy of the JCP in doubt. Lets call it a big miscommunication, shall we? Jonathan, I'd love to shake your hand on stage Tuesday (or offstage, or not shake hands, or.... Just send us an email if that's easier...) and move forward in the positive and productive manner that has characterized the relationship between Sun and the ASF for years now. Lets fix this.

Off to one of my favorite conferences, JavaOne. Could be an interesting week...

Or not.

The excellent unofficial Apache podcast site Feathercast has a podcast of me talking about Apache's open letter to Sun.

I tried to provide background and some detailed explanations of the situation surrounding this letter, including discussion about the "Field of Use" limitations, why the ASF thinks the offered license doesn't comply with the JSPA, and the implications for the JCP and Java as an open ecosystem.

I think it's worth the listen :)

Today, the Apache Software Foundation sent an open letter to Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, regarding the ASF's inability to acquire an acceptable TCK license for the Java SE TCK (also called the "JCK") in over 7 months of trying.

For more information, there is also a FAQ available.

Update : Links :

1. Sam Ruby
2. Stephen Colebourne's Weblog
3. Jim Jageilski
4. Behrang Saeedzadeh
5. Tim O'Brien
6. Bryan Noll

When I saw him last week, Crazy Bob mentioned his new dep injection framework called Guice and now it's released. It comes from Bob, so it's probably very fast, and as they use it internally at Google for doing no evil, so it's production tested and I'm guessing it really works well. Take a look.

While waiting for Eclipse 3.3M5eh to download (and waiting, and waiting...), ran across this story about the Oracle donation of TopLink to Eclipse. I had seen it before (yesterday), but given the free time I had (waiting...), I thought a bit more about it.

This puts Eclipse in the runtime business, and it will be interesting to see how this blossoms, if it blossoms. With the OSGi underpinnings continuing to gain traction and credibility, the popularity of the IDE and RCP ever growing, and what does appear to be a fairly large number of industry collaborators participating (163 member organizations?), there's a lot of potential, especially now that I imagine the RCP has world-class O/R mapping support. I do wonder how this will play out in the Age of Web2.0, but maybe if they had a runtime to ship with... Would that help in the SaaS arena?

Say what you will about the Java ecosystem, it's not boring :)

Over in Harmony-land, we're trying all the apps we can with Harmony to see how we're doing.

Latest on the list is NetBeans - we can already run Eclipse very well, and as we want to run everything, NetBeans is a good choice. (I love IDEA, but hey, I'm not doing the work, so I don't complain...)

Trying to work w/ NetBeans found two interesting problems :

• First, NetBeans uses private fields in Swing. Right - private fields. It uses reflection to get at JEditorPane.kitRegistryKey and JEditorPane.kitTypeRegistryKey. If it can't get them, it simply dumps the stack trace to the log, but it's not clear what harm comes form not supporting the private fields.
• Second, it also uses a sun private class "sun.awt.AppContext", so we can't actually compile it.

In Harmony, we have a policy that we want user's apps to Just Work, even if they do stupid^H^H^H^H contraindicated things like using private fields or implementation-specific non-API classes. We have a "Sun compatibility" module in Harmony where we collect those, and we will put in a "AppContext" class just so NetBeans can compile with Harmony. However, we can't figure out what those fields do as Sun's code is proprietary.

There is a bug report already filed against the use of AppContext, but I don't think anything is there for the swing fields.

We'd be happy to implement those in Harmony if we knew what they did - or maybe NetBeans can remove that code?

A week ago I attended FOSDEM for the first time. It's a fun conference. Held a university in Brussels "You want it to be Paris, but it isn't" Belgium, it attracts lots of people from all over. A large number appeared to be students, and I always love to experience that energy, drive and hope for the future that I find in students. Hopefully some rubbed off on me, to counter my "old guy" jadedness. Also, I got to spend time with good friends in the FLOSS community, including some of my favorite people from Sun. I felt like an adopted Sun employee sometimes, they were so gracious in letting me hang out with them.

There's lots of coverage about what was said in lots of blogs, but I think what was most interesting was what wasn't said, which boil down to two words - "Harmony" and "OSGi". I was there focused on open source java, so attended mainly the OpenJDK/GNUClasspath track. I had asked to participate months ago to give an update on Apache Harmony, but wasn't allowed a timeslot by the organizers. That's cool - it's their track, and I guess there wasn't time. But, it would have been nice to give an update on our progress - I think we have the most complete open source Java class library, and our VM is nothing to sneeze at - solid JIT, good GC, and performance that seems to be getting darn close to Sun's Java SE 5. We still have lots of work to do, but we're not yet 2 years old, and we've come so far, so fast. We do have a minor license incompatibility problem with the GPL-ed Java projects, but the FSF has realized the error of their ways, and is fixing it ;) As for what was presented, I thought it a nice overview of a variety of projects, and nice to put faces on names that I only know from IRC, email and blogs.

What was really odd was in the 2 hour discussion on packaging and deployment, not one person uttered "OSGi". I can't figure out why other than some NIH problem - it's a proven, mature spec currently in v4, with tons of deployments out there, from everything from cars to enterprise app servers with multiple open source implementations. Even Eclipse is built on it. I heard a bit about JSR-277, a still-in-progess JSR with no implementations.

The packaging story for the linux distros will be interesting. The core problem is that OpenJDK won't be releasing binaries, so if the distros want to include "Java" rather than "software we built from the source that goes into Java" (SWBFTSTGIJ), they'll need to get a TCK from Sun and certify that their build passes. (That's a interesting little minefield for everyone involved - more on this later). Even if Sun was releasing binaries in OpenJDK, the distros still have their own needs, such as layout, libraries, etc, so again, to do Java vs SWBFTSTGIJ, they need the TCK. I imagine that RedHat's customers want Java - they are now selling a full stack solution ("100% Open Source!") - and won't be happy with SWBFTSTGIJ.

Anyway, despite my minor disappointment re Harmony, it was a good conference for me. It was nice to get the general "free software" perspective on the world in general, and I'm eager to see how the drama of OpenJDK plays out in my little corner of the world. My real learning experience is getting a better understanding of the perspective of the linux packagers in the case of redistributing Java. They aren't concerned with the same things that us java implementors worry about - they really just want a clean way of distributing the software. They don't really care about our religious beliefs regarding compatibility, and I understand better how the JCP hoops we ask people to jump through may be a big problem. I look forward to see how this plays out, because I think that it's important we do everything we can to ensure that distros ship Java, and not SWBFTSTGIJ.

I'm happy to note that two of my proposals for JavaOne have been accepted (they were accepted in some "early selection" thingy that Sun did, but today the regular mailings went out, so I figure I can mention now).

The first will be a talk on - surprise - Apache Harmony with my fellow Harmonizer Tim Ellison of IBM. The second is the "Java Technology Libre Panel", setup by my dangerous friend Tom Marble from Sun. I'm honored to be on this one with Mark Wielaard from GNU Classpath, Tom Tromey from GCJ, Dalibor "Dance to Feedback" Topic from Kaffe and of course Tom himself, the newly appointed OpenJDK Ambassador.

I want to say "thanks" to Sun here. For various reasons, I'm not Sun's favorite person these days, and I'm glad that the issues that make me unpopular were kept separate from JavaOne (one of my favorite conferences, truth be told...). I'm still having trouble grokking why Sun put both sessions I'm involved in on their first brochure, as noted by Simon, and as a physicist, I should understand the inner workings of the sun, but I don't :)

My friend Tom Marble wrote this nice post thanking Apache for some of the projects that Sun uses in it's Glassfish and NetBeans projects. Tom's a classy guy. He's also a dangerous guy, a three-stripe red belt in Tae Kwon Do. He's standing for his black belt this summer, so if you aren't paying attention to what I just wrote, or are and still intend to pick a fight with Tom, do it before then, because then his hands will be registered weapons.

And Tom, I'm only brusque because I care :)

Yesterday, I noticed a funny hole in Sun's Java SE license in that users aren't permitted to use it on a laptop computer.

Today, a friend of mine pointed out another funny aspect and ambiguity of the license, again, in the definition of "Program" :

"Programs" mean Java applets and applications intended to run on the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE