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Monday June 25, 2007

Debconf7

This past week I attended the eighth Debian Developers Conference (Debconf7) in Edinburgh, Scotland. Debian is one of the Free Software distributions which is very important for the success of the Sun's Java Stack (OpenJDK and the rest of our Java portfolio including NetBeans and Glassfish). In addition to myself Sun also had presence at Debconf7 from Simon, Martin, and Barton.

Ironically I spent most of the first couple days catching up with Andrew Haley of Fedora -- another essential Free Software distribution for OpenJDK. Andrew and Dalibor came up for the first couple days of Debconf. I really appreciate getting to see them again (it's been since FOSDEM). We discussed many social and technical elements of OpenJDK and IcedTea that will be important going forward. Among the many topics we discussed was ways that we may be able to collaborate on open source Java for all GNU/Linux distributions. I suspect that there may be some interesting opportunities for collaboration since most of these distributions share many of the same upstream libraries and applications. I shared some of the tutorial that Petteri gave me recently on how Gentoo handles Java runtimes, libraries and applications. It has become clear that there are several layers of challenges and opportunities. Even if we share knowledge of packaging for GNU/Linux distributions we still need to have solutions which work for OpenSolaris Indiana, Mac OS X, and even Windows.

As we've discussed before part of this solution will be addressed by the Java Module System. Ideally Java modularity will interoperate nicely with each OS' native packaging system. The current lack of these standards has led to Java application developers falling into the habit of including all dependent libraries as part of their application installers. Of course to work best with operating systems with modern packaging systems each of these libraries needs to be refactored into independent packages. And we need to resist the temptation to have multiple library (ABI) versions proliferate. The very good news, however, is that as we encourage "upstreams" to adopt the open source "refactored on mutually independent packages" approach I am confident that out of the box (OOB) experience for Java application users will be substantially better.

Simon and I gave the "State of the Coffee Cup" presentation which gave a high level overview of the history of OpenJDK and roadmap for upcoming developments. We were fortunate to have cameo appearances by Dalibor (one of the outside IGB members) and Andrew (principal developer for IcedTea). You can download the video of our presentation (eventually the high-res version should get posted as well). Our talk was extremely well received and many developers are interested in getting OpenJDK into Debian "main" (woot!). I was especially pleased to hear from a couple developers that are currently deploying Sun Java (under the DLJ) to thousands of servers in grid deployments. This is one of the use cases we designed in packaging Sun Java for Debian last year and highlights one of the strengths of debconf (in this context I mean the Debian configuration tool).

Not surprisingly I had many requests for porting OpenJDK to new platforms. Of course Wookey (Embedded Debian) is keen to see the new ARM EABI port. Several mentioned PPC. We already know of great interest in SPARC. I am hopeful that we can facilitate the process of new ports soon.

One of the great things about meeting people at conferences like this is sometimes you get to meet not only friends from IRC but co-workers as well. I was really happy to meet Sun's own Martin Man and very impressed by his talk on Nexenta (Martin do you have the slides/screen capture posted anywhere?). Later that evening, after the keysigning party, one of the people I've meet on IRC -- Desmond -- who happens to be a Computer Science student graduating tomorrow from the University of Edinburgh went out to do a very personalized pub crawl. And yes, the beer is awesome!

Wednesday was the "Day Trip" to the Isle of Bute. This was great for the fantastic scenery (see my pix from Debconf7 and the Day Trip). In a continuing example of why attending these conferences is great I got to spend some time discussing the future of Xorg with Debian's maintainer, David Nusinow. We talked about how to work around the infamous XCB bug with Java and also about the future of X including OpenGL support.

I really want to thank Matthias Klose and Michael Koch (and the other Java DD's) for helping me prepare my talk "OpenJDK and the Free Java Packaging Roadmap". The video is not yet posted, but I did publish the slides.

Among the other very cool things at Debconf7 were Bdale's talk on Software Defined Radio, and, of course, the Céilidh!

Following Debconf I needed to make a connection at Heathrow with only 90 minutes to get from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4. Fortunately Simon and Andrew warned me about taking the bus. We arrived 30 minutes late and, despite the tight timing, I made it to the departure gate on time. My bag, however, did not (and last I checked it is still in London). Friends warned me about LHR from the USA Today article. In the future I shall follow Simon's advice and pack everything in one bag -- following the European norms!

NOTE on submitting comments: The Roller software we use here at Sun is quite aggressive about which comments it likes. Please be patient if your comment which includes HTML is not displayed immediately. I will ensure it gets published the next time I check e-mail.

Posted by tmarble ( Jun 25 2007, 08:57:52 AM CDT ) Permalink

Thursday May 31, 2007

revised Gmane decoder ring

Just want to give everyone a pointer to our new, shiny OpenJDK Gmane gateways.

Thanks again to Lars, Torsten and Wolfgang for providing this great service. If you find it's hard to track all the OpenJDK lists you can simply go to http://search.gmane.org/ and enter a keyword (e.g. "toolkit") and the group wildcard "comp.java.openjdk.*" to get hits in all the lists.

NOTE on submitting comments: The Roller software we use here at Sun is quite aggressive about which comments it likes. Please be patient if your comment which includes HTML is not displayed immediately. I will ensure it gets published the next time I check e-mail.

Posted by tmarble ( May 31 2007, 10:59:06 PM CDT ) Permalink

Friday May 11, 2007

Double Espresso

Wow.

This has been the most intense JavaOne I have ever intended. I have met so many interesting people and have had a great time talking about OpenJDK and the possibilities now. I know many of my friends have already done amazing things with OpenJDK... I can't wait to learn about all the cool hacking! I fully intended to blog on events this week, but I got caught up the dawn to dusk activities. I will be online again next week and look forward to chatting with everyone!

NOTE on submitting comments: The Roller software we use here at Sun is quite aggressive about which comments it likes. Please be patient if your comment which includes HTML is not displayed immediately. I will ensure it gets published the next time I check e-mail.

Posted by tmarble ( May 11 2007, 10:18:48 AM CDT ) Permalink