lundi mai 14, 2007 
lundi mai 14, 2007
Open source is not about "good enough" clones
This JavaOne was certainly big on client technologies which probably made my friend Romain very happy. Just looking at three announcements it may sound as if these are simply clones to existing technologies: JavaFX is compared to Flash, WorldWind Java to Google Earth and Project Wonderland (and derived MPK20) to SecondLife.
They all have Java in common but that's not the point. I would argue that community work and openness is what makes plausible the promise of taking existing concepts to a new level. Open source JavaFX runs everywhere, not just in most browsers, but on all platforms. WorldWind Java is not extensible via plugins, it *is* a plugin. Project Wonderland is bringing business collaboration to what today is essentially anonymous gaming.
( mai 14 2007, 05:00:00 PM CEST ) Permalink
Being quite concentrated this year at JavaOne on server-side and GlassFish content, I did not attend Ethan's talk on the Consumer JRE (né Java Browser Edition and aka Java Kernel). Some time ago I had written down my thoughts on how doable and needed I thought this was (and I wasn't all that positive I must say). Now with JavaFX around the corner, this is becoming a high priority and a quick chat with Chet Haase has me more positive about the possible size improvements.
The numbers are now as follows: entire JRE (Java 6) is under 11Mb. HelloWorld requires a 2Mb download. Notepad, Swing Set, and LimeWire translate to something between 3 and 4 Mb downloads. The improvements over what I had measured as due to dynamic libraries (dll, so) optimizations (I had only looked at rt.jar which is only responsible for half the JRE size) or even removal while some others are relative and due to JDK 6 bundling more stuff than 5.0 which I did the review for (JAX-WS is the most obvious example).
Results coming to a JRE near you as soon as for 6.0 update 2.
( mai 14 2007, 11:06:41 AM CEST ) Permalink
