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 …
Author Archives: Thomas Fitzsimmons
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. …
gcjwebplugin + IcedTea
I integrated gcjwebplugin into the IcedTea repository today. With Sun’s class library I’m able to install a proper applet security manager so that gcjwebplugin can run untrusted applets safely.
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. …
Plans for OpenJDK
Our team at Red Hat has been doing some planning now that OpenJDK has been released. First, a summary of OpenJDK’s status: What Sun has released: most of the 1.6-level JDK, including: the Hotspot virtual machine with x86 and x86_64 JITs the Java compiler most of the class libraries What Sun hasn’t released: 4% of …
IcedTea
I packaged the new code drop from the OpenJDK project using the JPackage conventions. Because naming rules are still being worked out for derivatives of OpenJDK code, I’ve decided to call the result “java-1.7.0-icedtea”. This is just a preliminary development package; I hope Sun will approve renaming it “java-1.7.0-openjdk” or “java-1.6.0-openjdk” when it officially lands …
Java Modules in Fedora
Andrew Overholt recently pointed me to a blog entry on Java module systems. I can’t comment in detail on the JSRs or how they should interact because they’re all behind click-through licenses. My instinct tells me the ideal answers are: “Sun, drop JSR 277 and adopt OSGi; IBM, develop OSGi within the Java tree, on …
FOSDEM 2007
Tom Marble is a wizard at getting the right people in a room together. In the Distro DevJam we had Java packagers from Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat, OpenSUSE, SUSE, Mandriva, Gentoo and FreeBSD, together with all the right people from Sun. This was the perfect group for discussing packaging issues surrounding OpenJDK (and a …