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Monday December 11, 2006

On the open road

Today was the official unveiling of JDK 6 -- the next major version of the Java SE Platform. JDK 6 represents many, many engineer-years of effort to add features, remove bugs and improve performance.

My colleague Dave Dagastine has an excellent blog today about how JDK 6 leads in "out of the box" performance. My friend Geir asked this morning if OOB is a convenient thing for us to talk about now. And as I explained we've been working on this problem for some time now because we realize that most of you have other things to do than read the dictionary cover-to-cover or examine an exhaustive list of JVM options. We started with the idea of coalescing key options into one, then we progressed to formerly calling this effort "Ergonomics", to refining the heuristics so that the JVM does a better job of tuning it's own dials. (oops.. the Java SE 6 Performance Whitepaper is still on the ToDo list ). The trajectory is towards smart and easy performance.

In an analogous way we've progressed with very complex ad hoc integration of Java on GNU/Linux platforms to working with GNU/Linux (and OpenSolaris) distributions on first class integration and installation as simple as apt-get install sun-java5-jdk. With the help of expedited legal review from Carla Schroer and expedited release engineering from David Katleman today I was able to release the DLJ developer bundles for JDK 6. Hopefully you will find JDK 6 available soon in distro native packaging for Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Nexenta, and BeliniX (to name a few). A Debian user asked me today if JDK 6 would get into the next release ("etch") and I think it's pretty late in the release cycle for that, but even in the worst case the installation command would have to modified ever so slightly to pull sun-java6 from the newer "unstable" repository: apt-get -t unstable install sun-java6-jdk. There is still more work to do, of course, in improving Java's integration with Free Software distros. Geir and I were also talking about the need for standardizing on conventions such as filesystem layout and Java policy so that users and developers can rely on Java services "just working". Hey Geir perhaps that points to an area where OpenJDK and Harmony can collaborate? I'd also like to send a big thanks to Simon for your words of encouragement!



So these are simply steps on the road towards better performance, better integration and software freedom. People have asked me how come Sun Java isn't available on Fedora. The reason is that Fedora doesn't have the non-free repository notion and focuses exclusively on Free Software (look for: Excellence: The Free Java Platform). That's why GCJ developers like Anthony Green (whom I met at OSCON this summer... does anyone remember OSCON?) are very keen to see the liberation of Java. Indeed it was great to see RedHat's endorsement of OpenJDK. In fact the outpouring of support has been overwhelming. I regularly talk with Mark Wielaard of the Classpath project and Dalibor Topic of the Kaffe virtual machine project who share their enthusiasm and coaching for OpenJDK. But I didn't expect what Tom Tromey would say about what OpenJDK means for the Free Java implementations.

When people put their confidence in you it really makes you want to work your very hardest for them. Thanks for joining us on the open road!

Posted by tmarble ( Dec 11 2006, 10:57:45 PM CST ) Permalink