GNU Classpath workshop impressions

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi all,

Back from vacation. At the end of the vacation I went to the GNU
Classpath workshop and Linux-Kongress in Saarbruecken.
Was very nice to meet a couple of developers in real live.

On Wednesday Sascha Brawer, Patrik Reali, Jeroen Frijters, Chris Gray,
Dalibor Topic. Jean Daniel Fekete and I spoke about Java2D and OpenGL.
Jean Daniel had slides which I hope can be published for others to look
at. But please take a look at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/agile2d/ if you
haven't so yet. Jean Daniel is really interested to get this working
with a free vm and GNU Classpath. We tried to come up with a list of
things that have to be done to get this working and although there is
certainly still a lot of work to do we do have large parts working
already. I am hoping that Sascha his notes are better then mine and that
he can post the list of things we need to get working to get Agile2D
running with GNU Classpath.

To really benefit from OpenGL you do need hardware support and there are
only a few free software drivers out there. There is always Mesa, which
is slow, but at least we would have the functionality. And most work
that needs to be done seems to be important for other 2D approaches. I
know to little about the graphics card hardware vendors to get a good
feeling about how "save" the OpenGL route is for our Free Software
efforts.

One important issue that remained open was how java threads and the
threading model of the underlying graphics framework should work
together.

After that, Jean Daniel had to leave early, we discussed some other GNU
Classpath issues such as: autobuilders, (auto) mauve, attracting
developers with task lists, spicing up the website, vm interfacing,
things not yet implemented, ... Again Sascha was the most organized and
made a todo list which I hope he will send to the list.

Jeroen also has a little report at the ikvm weblog:
http://weblog.ikvm.net/PermaLink.aspx/c69de097-f0a3-4018-9ba7-f04f6f743d46

The next day Michael Tieman (Red Hat CTO) gave the Linux-Kongress
keynote. In his speech he explicitly mentioned the Eclipse project so we
(Chris, Sascha, Patrik, Dalibor and I) decided to have a little chat
with him. Although he now is a bobo of big company who doesn't do much
technical hacking anymore, he clearly knew a lot about the things that
go on. He was pretty optimistic about the direction of the Eclipse
project and how they handle outside input. Although he didn't really
made any commitments it was clear that he cared deeply about a free java
like framework. We also talked about how the CPL (Common Public
License), that Eclipse and SWT are distributed under, which makes it
impossible to use when combining it with any GPL covered code. And we
might be able to convince them (he is on the Eclipse Board of Stewards)
to resolve this issue. Although again no promises, but I think this is
something we should try to push a little.

After Chris Gray had to leave I gave a little talk about old and new VM
Interface approaches for which I didn't have time on Wednesday.
Slides can be found at:
http://www.klomp.org/mark/classpath/slides/gnu_classpath_workshop.html
They are clearly not complete, but I like to use them to update the
Hackers Guide and VM Integration Guide.

Patrik, Sascha and I also talked to one of the organizers, Martin
Schulte, about organizing some event around Classpath, libre java, VM
concepts, ... We didn't reach a good goal for such a meeting so we will
contact him again with some ideas and see if he can help (which he
seemed to really like to do).

Surely I forgot something important that happened, but hopefully someone
else that was there can remind me :)

I am still a bit behind on email, so if you have been waiting on a reply
for some time now please send me a little reminder.

Cheers,

Mark

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