OpenJDK and Fedora 10

I’m planning two Fedora Features for OpenJDK in Fedora 10. I’ll write the Wiki pages soon. Improved Multilib Support for JDK Packages The first feature is improved multilib support for Java packages. This will involve fixing the darn persistent rpm scriptlet argument bug and adding multilib support to jpackage-utils and java-1.6.0-openjdk. I already have patches …

OpenJDK 6 and Fedora 9

OpenJDK 6 was released in Fedora 9. Yay! The name change is satisfying and it’s great to see the past 6 months’ efforts come to fruition. For me this isn’t quite as exciting as the release of Fedora 8, which was the first distribution release to include IcedTea packages, based on an OpenJDK 7 pre-release …

CommunityOne 2008, JavaOne 2008

CommunityOne 2008 Monday, May 5 I thought my CommunityOne talk, The IcedTea Project: Developing OpenJDK for Deployment on GNU/Linux, went pretty well. The audience was small but full of important people 🙂 Martin Buchholz introduced himself after my presentation and we chatted a little about Google’s plans to contribute to OpenJDK. After the talk I …

LiveConnect support in IcedTea

My FOSDEM talk was on IcedTea and LiveConnect. I’ve been working on a gcjwebplugin rewrite called IcedTeaPlugin on-and-off for the past five months. Whereas gcjwebplugin is a Netscape 4.x plugin, IcedTeaPlugin is an XPCOM plugin that implements OJI — the Open JVM Interface — for LiveConnect support. I showed two demos at FOSDEM, one demo …

Conkeror

On Monday, I found Conkeror through the EmacsWiki. It’s a Firefox extension that provides an Emacs-like interface to the browser. It includes all the essential Emacs features (minibuffer, incremental search, bookmark tab completion, buffer management) and an additional killer feature: numbered links. I’ve always wanted an efficient way to follow links and this is it. …

OpenJDK Testing

Here are some testing strategies that I’d like to see implemented for IcedTea. I’ve asked one of our interns to investigate these points. Reduce Mauve-on-IcedTea failures to 0 Provide reproducible way of running Mauve on IcedTea which should result in 0 failures “make dist” target for Mauve Once these are complete we can a) set …

OpenJDK Packager’s Wishlist

Here are some thoughts about how to make OpenJDK easily maintainable on Fedora. Achieving this goal will require changes to OpenJDK, updates to the Fedora implementation of the JPackage conventions and an rpm patch. Here is a list of problems and a strawman solution for each. Each item needs careful investigation to determine the most …

Java, Accessibility, GNOME

I’m experimenting with GNOME’s accessibility support; specifically, how it interacts with Swing and AWT applications. I’m impressed with the framework’s implementation. I had trouble saving GOK‘s alternative pointer device setting, and there seems to be an issue with having the alternative pointer device control the core pointer, but otherwise the interface is stable and usable. …