The Apache guys are trying to implement yet another J2SE. FAQ here.
Apache Harmony – Opensource J2SE 5
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Eugenia Loli
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The one-liner description makes it sound like a pointless development. However, having an open source JVM and Java API is very desireable for alot of different reasons. First and foremost, for securing the future viability of Java (should Sun get bought or die, etc).
And I forgot to mention that an organization like ASF could really have the gravitas necessary to make something like this shake things up on a large scale. IMHO, anything done to dilute Sun’s stranglehold on Java is a Good Thing(TM).
I wonder what the reason behind this is. I mean, we’ve already got Kaffe and Classpath. I haven’t looked at the ML archives; maybe there’s some friction there between devs or something.
Nope. from the mailing list, there’re Kaffe, Classpath, and GCJ people supporting the project as well (they will still developing their current project, though). They may not be able to share the code (as the license conflict), but will share their experiences.
ASF has LOTS of Java experiences and code. I believe they can reuse a fairly huge enough of their code — except for the VM part. Apache Commons, Regexp, log4j, XML things are examples.
I really wish the Harmony bring harmony to Java community
What a good name!
I think Harmony is a pointless exercise. What we have is fine right now. The way I see it people will never be happy with Sun whether the open up Java or Solaris….That is how I see it. Also I dont see the point of having an open Java. Quite frankly right now the Java we are getting to see and use is incredible. They have a lot of community contributions and they are making things easier and easier for more people to contribute but I think if it was made open, the directionality of Java would be lost and it would become more like Linux. Too many flavors with a sense of chaos. That is not to say too many flavors are bad. IT is just the chaos part that is going to and is hurting Linux’s growth. I love Linux and I think it is just absolutely incredible what people have achieved but there are a lot of people uncomfrotable because they sense some chaos. And also the fact that MS makes things so easy to use that a brain dead person can operate a computer is also not helping.
My point is opening everything is not right. It is not as if Sun is not letting you look at the code. Sun is just not letting you to modify it to fit “your” particular needs. They have a stringent bug fixing and feature adding system. How can it be more open than that? There should always be someone or some authority out there monitoring everything. I think Java 5 and especially 6 are the best things to have happened to us Java lovers. If Harmony is truly bent upon doing something to benefit all us developers, and produce awesome products like APache web serve, Tomcat, Struts and so on, they need to try and focus on implementing maybe only one aspect. Like a JVM only that has really badass performance! While the Harmony pproject is a very noble intention, Open Sourcing everything is not the right way. Java is working fine right now, lots of features are being added, improvements everywhere. I think we should leave it as it is.
I am afraid I have to disagree: what we have now is not very good. At all.
Of course Java on Windows x86, or even GNU/Linux x86, or solaris is good, and a few embarked thingies too.
But what of PPC (GNU/Linux, e.g.) ? What of *BSD ? What of AmigaOS/MorphOS ? What of {whatever OS you want here} ?
This might be a question of being open or not, to some. But I’ll take it as an opportunity to get Java everywhere.
Which is claimed here and there by Java lovers, and Sun, but is absolutely not a reality. CORE is just nonsense, at the moment.
Getting ASP on the job may be the best news ever for Java — whether users or developers.
“It is not as if Sun is not letting you look at the code. Sun is just not letting you to modify it to fit “your” particular needs.”
Translation: Thank you, master, for letting me do what you want for me to do.
Remember the concept of freedom. If you disagree that people should be free, and that code should be free (as in freedom), then fine. But that is where the problem lies.
“The way I see it people will never be happy with Sun whether the open up Java or Solaris….That is how I see it.”
Study the subject more carefully if that’s how you see it. Try to find out both sides of the issue, and the underlying concepts and differing philosophies. You’ll be really enlightened.
this is a promising development for the open source Java world…Sun may not open source Java but if we have a freely available implementation that can be made to run on virtually any platform/OS (including those that Sun does not support or know their existence!)…this can be the best thing that has happened to Java so far
Sure ok I agree being an avid XP user and an avid Linux user on the x86 platforms I never ever really cared about the PPC and still dont. But I can see where you are coming from. Sun as a company has to make profit. Plain and simple. The reasoning behind Sun not releasing stuff for the BSDs or the PPC platforms, I will never know. Without knowing their reasons I can not complain at all because millions of other developers including me as a recent graduate, things with Java just work fine.
Nothing in this world is all encompassing. I mean OS X is a brilliantly written OS and I know good old Stevie aint gonna release a port for the x86 platform EVER! So what I have the choice to buy a Mac machine (not gonna happen cause its monetarily a waste from what I have experienced). So I decided i am going to stick with XP and make it work for me to get my work done. If not I can switch to Linux. Linux is great! And I have used JVM implementations and Netbeans in Linux and it works just fine!
That does not mean I am trying to say that Harmony is not going to be a success or i am going to be vehemently opposing it. It is just that it does not affect me positively or negatively right now. I am just voicing my opinion and it could turn out a lot of beenfits would be realized from this project and then I will stand corrected. But as of right now you cannot really bash Sun. If people want to go ahead and start Harmony my best wishes but I think there will be a lot more other areas in computing that could do with such attention than this. More people are using the Linux and Windows platforms so Sun is catering to it that is all. IF you guys want to run Java on some hobby OS go ahead and the best of luck but the chance of that receiving significant momentum is not there…at least I cannot see it. Could be because i am close minded but someone please englighten me.
I think a project like this will take financial help from large companies and so. I can see a requirement for BSD and so on but not for anything else. My 2 cents.
Another effort at a JVM and class libraries? So they’re targetting JSE5 and by the time they get done, Sun will be on Java 7 or 8. And then you’ve got Kaffe, and Classpath, and whatever else. In the real world people are perfectly happy with downloading Sun’s free Java. What a waste. I can’t believe that these people aren’t going to be bored out of their minds anyway. It’s the last 10% that counts. We all know where this is heading. Another half-assed implementation that will be years behind the official version.
Instead of trying to developing another JVM they should port the functionality of the Class Libraries of Java to another language.
Let’s see what that would mean:
The Libraries are the strong part of Java because they have functionality that everyone as a base needs and the libs are not scattered like for example the Perl libs (in CPAN). They come from one source so they cannot be scattered.
And the strongest point is: Because of the great marketing of SUN the vocabular of the Java libs are known by thousands of devs.
By porting to another language the functionality of the Java libs you get greater portability, the known functionality and the possibility of greater expandability.
Think of it! I am a genius!
Instead of trying to developing another JVM they should port the functionality of the Class Libraries of Java to another language.
Completely useless, but I expect to see a sourceforge project started on the concept which will remain pre-pre-alpha until the end of time. You can never underestimate open source in re-inventing the wheel for the 8,000th time.
There existing some bloggers, who wrote a little bit more about it:
http://www.advogato.org/person/robilad/
http://www.advogato.org/person/rmathew/
http://weblog.ikvm.net/
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2005/May-07.html
http://www.jroller.com/page/fate/20050507#death_to_apache
>Another half-assed implementation that will be years >behind the official version.
Like Mono?
Here is a quick statement by the GNU Classpath maintainer Mark Wielaard on Harmony:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.classpath.devel/5517
This could be a good thing, and could certainly be achievable given enough weight behind it. Miguel de Icaza in his blog is right though – there is quite a bit of work involved, and it will need significant support. IBM and the Eclipse guys should certainly be interested, as the primary JVM that people use with Eclipse and in the Java world does tend to be Sun’s.
However, given the huge usage of Java around Apache’s infrastructure I think we’ll see a lot more momentum now that Apache are being seen to throw their weight behind it. They also have a significant amount of power in being able to make this implementation distributable with Apache, and without making people having to manually agree to any licensing terms as with Sun. Classpath and Kaffe etc. have never had that and have never really been supported by Apache as a whole, so that effect shouldn’t be underestimated.
We’ll have to see how this turns out, but I think this should be the beginning of a genuinely open sourced Java.
First, it’s ridiculous to talk about making a “beginning” to open-source Java. This was begun years ago and there has been huge effort with success on many fronts. Secondly, the Harmony initiative strikes me as attempt to organize that huge free-java world – Mark Wielaard calls it a “nice addition and extension to the GNU Classpath ecosystem”, recognizing that Free Java already exists, if disjointedly.
All in all, Apache made a surprisingly unclear beginning to Harmony, making it more murky and unexplained than it needed to be. They should have waited until a clear, consise mission statement was prepared.
i think that’s why the project is being called “Harmony” .. bring together existing components/experiences together
—-
it would be great to see some parts of Javolution ( https://javolution.dev.java.net/ ) made their way to this Apache Harmony
a very short review of Javolution http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=29717
“The fastest implementations of the most common interfaces …”
Yes, I agree, the announcement is misleading in a way, it made it sound that Apache had looked at alternatives and decided to do their own because of ‘licensing barriers’. See planet.classpath.org for a few clarifying comments from me and others.
If you want to see something like harmony being gradually implemented today, it has already been happening for a while between kaffe and gcj. We are starting to share more components, the verifier is next.
cheers,
dalibor topic
Jean-Marie Dautelle, Javolution project owner, just replied this to the mailing list:
Hi,
Feel free to include whole/part of the Javolution library
(http://javolution.org) in the harmony project.
Best Regards,
Jean-Marie Dautelle (Javolution project owner).
Cool!
Apart of Javolution, there’s JScience ( http://jscience.org/ ) which contains some good maths code. Also by Dautelle
FYI, Jean-Marie Dautelle is one of the expert group in
JCP’s “JSR 108: Units Specification”
http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=108
🙂
First, it’s ridiculous to talk about making a “beginning” to open-source Java.
I agree to disagree. No it isn’t the beginning beginning, but it is the realistic beginning. How much support do you see for application servers and Java infrastructure around Apache etc. running with implementations like Kaffe and Classpath? None, that’s how much, and there certainly isn’t anything of a critical mass.
Secondly, the Harmony initiative strikes me as attempt to organize that huge free-java world – Mark Wielaard calls it a “nice addition and extension to the GNU Classpath ecosystem”, recognizing that Free Java already exists, if disjointedly.
Well, since they’re going to be using Classpath and possibly infrastructure and expertise from many other projects, no, they’re not starting from scratch. Considering the work involved, that would be pretty unrealistic.
There’s nothing new about this kind of stories. I mean, how many times did we hear about communities splitting for unknown reasons (which actors always consider “clear”…)?
So now we have another proposal stating there’s a “clear” need (uh?) for another Java implemetation. Whatever that “clear” could mean.
Since I’m “clearly” out of Java world, maybe I could watch at things using a different lens, that is lens of someone who doesn’t support one party over the other one. Being malicious (and paying respect to people involved), it all looks to me like an usual business war more than an usual OSS “crazyness”. Could that name be IBM?
Sun has been target of a huge encirclement fire, with many people asking them to open-source Java. While it looked an OSS world request, according to what I read, Sun always pointed its finger toward IBM, resisted and didn’t fall.
While I’m not a Java developer, I heard that community Sun built around Java is very open, it fairly listens to suggestions, it accepts patches and so on. It looks very sexy to OSS endorsers. Plus, Java it’s free (isn’t it?).
How much money is IBM (or Red Hat) paying to Sun for Java? I bet those are big bucks. Instead, Sun open-sourced Solaris, promised to release a Linux compatibility layer plus innovative features for free. This is a direct threat to companies like IBM and Red Hat which are investing in Linux but depend on Java. They won’t be able to control Sun the way they do with other Joe Coder(s) developer.
So a few weeks after barrage fire over open-source Java is over, Apache is announcing they will implement a new Java version. This is just an announcement as they have nothing in hands and they “hope” someone will give them something.
But message is clear: give us Java or we will fragment it, reducing Java value and impact because of such fragmentation and thus, Sun value.
This is a clear proof that OSS dreamworld doesn’t exist. It’s still big companies using new (cheap) ways to pursue their goals. Sad but true. I guess now we know why big companies tried to acquire / employ key figures in OSS world.
Again, I’m saying this with all respect which is dued to such people.
I would love to see this happen and be useful, but mostly so far its just talk. If they choose not to use Classpath….then see Perl6 for a development timeline.
Apache will not be using Classpath libraries with the current Classpath license. Classpath will have to be re-licensed.
…so one can code in Java and Compile on every GCC supported arch to native code, that rocks!
Apache will not be using Classpath libraries with the current Classpath license. Classpath will have to be re-licensed.
If you’d actually read around you’d have known that they’re talking with the FSF about getting things compatible.
Harmony wont work. If it works hats off but like I said they will be always behind, and therein lies the incentive to not use it. Sun has and is doing a brilliant job so far and I kinda wish that they implemented Javolution libraries as part of the jdk as well cause it looks great.
Apache Harmony Wiki
http://wiki.apache.org/harmony/
kickstarted !