Debian/Free Java room at Fosdem (February 21/22, Brussel)

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi all,

It is official now. We will have a developer room at Fosdem (February
21/22, Brussels, Belgium) where we will be able to meet, discuss, hack
and give presentations. We will be sharing that room with the Debian
people so we have to coordinate a bit who does what when, but they are
nice people (and some of us are Debian people) so I am sure we will
manage. Also the embedded room has invited us to give a presentation on
anything related to VMs on small devices or standardization issues.

The preliminary program is as follows:

- Official talk by Tom Tromey (not in devroom).
  Hopefully we can invite people who became interested in discussing gcj
  some more to the developer room afterwards.
  http://www.fosdem.org/2004/index/speakers/speakers_tromey

- Possible presentation on SableVM by Grzegorz B. Prokopski
  (sablevm is packaged for Debian by Grzegorz himself)

- Possible GNU Classpath overview presentation by Sascha Brawer and me.
  Abstract attached. (It is a bit technical now, to make it more
  appealing to others we could probably make this into a showcase of
  applications and VMs that shows what is possible with free java
  replacements today.)

Discussion topics (small hacker meetings):
- GNU Classpath 1.0 RoadMap discussion (Mark Wielaard).
- Free VM/Compiler integration/cooperation discussion (???).
- Standardization and compatibility issues (Chris Gray?)

People from the following projects will attend:

GNU Classpath: Sascha Brawer, Michael Koch, Mark Wielaard
gcj: Tom Tromey, Andrew Haley
Kaffe: Dalibor Topic, Stephane Meslin-Weber, (Guilhem Lavaux)
Debian: Arnaud Vandyck
SableVM: Grzegorz Prokopski
Wonka: Chris Gray
Jaos: (Patrik Reali)
IKVM: (Jeroen Frijters)

Please let me know if you are going to attend, want to give a
presentation and/or lead a discussion. The most interesting will be
things that are also interesting for either the Debian or the embedded
people. Please send suggestions before January 5 so we will have enough
time to arrange things. Since we share the room with the Debian people
it will probably not be possible to add more then one or two small
presentations though.

There will also be a key-signing party as Fosdem which I think will be
good to attend to create a bigger and stronger web-of-trust. Please
consider joining.

For more info see also http://www.fodem.org/

Cheers,

Mark

P.S. I will be on vacation and away from my mail this week, but will
make sure to read all suggestions next weekend and make a final program
as soon as possible when I return.

P.P.S Please feel free to invite people from related projects
      (share and forward away!)

GNU Classpath -- Core Classes for a Diversity of Free Java Virtual Machines

The goal of GNU Classpath is to provide an implementation of the core
class libraries for the Java language that is not under proprietary
control.  Because the license grants developers, users and researchers
the freedom to adapt it to their purposes, GNU Classpath has become a
catalyst for innovative VM and compiler projects.

Due to the richness of the library, GNU Classpath is a very large and
ambitious project. This very richness means that Free Software developers
can use a reasonably well designed, object-oriented framework that covers
most needs of a typical application. The support ranges from abstract
data types to graphical user interfaces, from low-level network
abstractions to remote method invocation with over-the-network class
loading, from mathematical libraries to database access. Because the Java
framework is accepted by the mainstream, many developers are already
familiar with its structure. This means that people can quickly write
free software while relying on a stable, tightly integrated foundation.

GNU Classpath is used by several Virtual Machines. Therefore, the library
must support execution environments with rather diverse, sometimes even
conflicting design goals.  Examples include the GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ),
which is an ahead-of-time compiler, producing object files conformant to
the binary interface of C++; the IBM Jikes Research VM (RVM), which is
completely written in Java; IKVM.NET, which translates Java bytecodes to
the .NET Intermediate Language and works on top of Mono; Jaos, which
builds on top of the Aos/Bluebottle kernel and implements all low-level
methods in Active Oberon; and Kaffe OpenVM, a traditional byte-code
interpreter and just in time compiler available on lots of platforms.
We show the techniques that GNU Classpath uses to cope with the needs of
multiple, very different VMs.

Since a group of dedicated people has worked on GNU Classpath over the
course of five years, it is now possible to develop and run large Java
programs in an entirely free environment. A live demonstration of Eclipse,
a large desktop, and Tomcat, a large server application, will illustrate that
serious applications can now be developed on top of the framework.
Nonetheless, we want to extend the core libraries with even more standard
classes, so a lot of work still remains to be done.  The talk concludes by
showing how people can contribute to GNU Classpath, and in which areas help
would be most appreciated.


About the speakers:

Sascha Brawer has studied Computational Linguistics, working on
optimizing compilation methods for natural language processing. He has
worked as a software developer and in industrial research before founding
Dandelis, a company that develops free software. He lives in Berne,
Switzerland.

Mark Wielaard studied Theoretical Computer Science at the University of
Amsterdam, working on functional and logic programming languages. In the
past he has worked on GNUJSP and servlet libraries and currently helps
with the gcj and kaffe projects. In 2000 he joined GNU Classpath and he
now is the GNU maintainer of that project.

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