Sun Releases First GPLed Java Source 206
An anonymous reader writes "You can now get GPLed JVM sources from Sun. Everyone seemed to be expecting the desktop version (J2SE) but J2ME has been released first. It looks to be buildable for Linux x86, MIPS, and ARM platforms. Sun now calls it 'phoneME.' Enjoy."
Re:Linux is great and all (Score:5, Insightful)
Mono is comparable, yes.
However, Qt, GTK and wxWidgets are all just GUI toolkits! You still need a programming
language (Pascal, C++, Perl, even Java(!)) to use these. Installation will be easier,
though. I'm personally looking forward to "apt-get install sun-java" or somesuch.
Also, it will soon (when J2SE comes out) be possible to write better integration with existing
apps, such as better (faster, more modern) browser applet plugins. That, I'm looking
forward to.
(Oh, and now that the sources aer GPLed, it should be really easy to make this thing run on *BSD if it doesn't already)
Re:Its 7:00 AM and its slashdotted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Linux is great and all (Score:2, Insightful)
Mono is not compareanble either (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure,
Re:Its 7:00 AM and its slashdotted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Congratulations to Sun and Thank You. (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I'm concerned: the short-term impact of this will be decent as people start getting their teeth into the source (as they have done since November), but the long-term impact will be fucking huge. I don't have a lot of personal experience, but this announcement combined with the fact that so many CS degrees start with OOP by teaching in Java means that people will routinely be encouraged to appreciate the power of FOSS from the start, before they get used to the limitations that its absence imposes.
To reiterate: This-Is-A-Good-Thing.
Re:Linux is great and all (Score:3, Insightful)
Sun did what nobody expected, opensourced its greatest (both in terms of size and of completeness) and industry leading development platform. Now productivity at the grasp of even the most rabid opensource zealot.
Now what? You are going to tell it's "too late"? I will tell you what is going to happen, Mono has just lost any reason to exist and to be used. It will always be an outdated and slow piece of software, always playing catch up with the latest features of
Re:Mono is not compareanble either (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the software I administrate is a Java application, it's probably the ONLY Java application I've dealt with that hasn't been a royal piece of shit. Most in house development stuff here seems to be
So, just because I'm not you, and don't agree with you, doesn't mean I don't have a clue. Get over yourself.
Re:Mono is not compareanble either (Score:4, Insightful)
Comparable means you can compare the two things - one might be wonderful and the other total shit, but they exist on the same spectrum.
Apples and oranges are (canonically) not comparable because they're different fruit, so they have different criteria to be fairly judged on.
You can compare a nice apple with, say, a shitty, maggot-ridden one - they both have the same criteria, so comparison is valid.
So, on the basis they're both managed programming environments, both compile to bytecode, both tackle the same kinds of tasks in a similar way, you can compare Mono,
You might believe one is better than the others, but that doesn't make them incomparable.
Re:Quality of the code? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mono is not compareanble either (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
.NET and Java in the enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
It's kind of amusing, when you think about it, that what Sun really got out of their lawsuit against Microsoft for their (really, really minor, especially relative to stuff like what Netscape did) modifications to Java was a pure competitor in .NET.
You mention .NET's ability to easily (I'd say "relatively easily") link to native code as a big detriment, but in many .NET implementations that's not used at all. It's easier to work with disparate code like that through a SOAP or database interface. In practice you see a lot of .NET front-ends to traditional servers via a SOAP integration. You see less of it used as a replacement for traditional MFC code, the kind of thing where such integration would be most useful.
But getting back to the enterprise, .NET's largest problem in terms of enterprise software is not that it's less mature than Java (in many ways I'd say that Microsoft took the good stuff from Java and improved it a lot) but rather that it's locked to Windows. Maybe you haven't noticed, but Windows is not a very good server operating system -- not very reliable, not very fast (except in very specialized situations), certainly not scalable. It's all very well and good that you can drop a couple of hundred boxes in there to scale to huge applications, but when you could run the same application on a single Sun you're really not making a cost-effective choice. (I wish I were making that up, but it is actually pretty typical to be able to replace as many as 100 Windows servers with a midsize Sun or two, and that is true not only of stuff like IIS/ASPX versus Apache/whatever that are differentiated by more than OS but also for directly comparable stuff like databases and ETL). Push Windows hard and it will break, often. It's nuts to put it in critical places (although that is done, a LOT, and people pay the price in ongoing maintenance).
Having said that, .NET is probably the single best GUI implementation framework I've seen yet (although that may be damning it with faint praise), and Windows, at least aside from the malware issue, is a pretty fine desktop. In that domain it shows what Java could have been if Sun had been even remotely competent (rather than giving us stuff like AWT and the Swing abomination). We're going to see a lot of .NET on the desktop because it is pretty much best-of-breed. More power to it.
Java is today, and has been since at least the late '90s, often used in enterprise situations. Whether or not it's appropriate in a lot of those situations is debatable, but it is deeply integrated into the core operations of a lot of companies at this point. Personally I feel that JMS is not very good at its job and J2EE as a whole is a steaming pile of dung designed by people who wouldn't know a good application architecture if it ran over their foot, but Java as a whole and these things in particular are out there and being used by a lot of people -- and at least in some cases doing a good job.
It is certainly possible to build robust, reasonably efficient large-scale Java applications. It is even easier to do that in Java than it is in C++, especially if you avoid some of the more ridiculous parts of J2EE. But that doesn't mean it's easy to build that kind of thing, and as you might expect there are a large number of really awful Java applications out there (just as the majority of large applications built on all the other languages out
Re:Linux is great and all (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Linux is great and all (Score:3, Insightful)