For those of us who slept through the month of June, the OpenJDK 6 stack in Fedora was certified as TCK compliant. Meaning it can carry the “100% Java(TM)” moniker. Rich Sharples has a nice write-up (with a second part answering the blogosphere):
In June, 2007 - Red Hat launched the IcedTea project with the goal of making OpenJDK usable without requiring any other software that is not free. That in turn would allow OpenJDK to be included in Fedora and other Linux distributions without restrictions. The IcedTea Project made use of previous work developed under the GNU Classpath Project which had been independently driving towards a free and open implementation of the Java class libraries.
This week [19 June 2008 - ed.] the IcedTea Project reached an important milestone - The latest OpenJDK binary included in Fedora 9 (x86 and x86_64) passes the rigorous Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). This means that it provides all the required Java APIs and behaves like any other Java SE 6 implementation - in keeping with the portability goal of the Java platform. As of writing, Fedora 9 is the only operating system to include a free and open Java SE 6 implementation that has passed the Java TCK. All of the code that makes this possible has been made available to the IcedTea project so everyone can benefit from the work.
At another point in his article, Rich mentions that we can expect to see this Java SE 6 in an update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The packages are already available from Fedora’s Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, the source for the packages that Red Hat engineering is going to QA/test and build for the Enterprise Linux 5 update.
At the JBoss booth at JavaOne 2008, I spoke with RichFaces developer Alexander Smirnov (OGG, MP3.) Alexander is the founder of the Ajax4jsf project, which he started as a personal side effort. It grew out of his interest in JSF and was originally run as a stand alone, self-hosted project.
As he developed Ajax4jsf, Alexander began working with the MyFaces community, and started communicating more with the larger JSF community. He moved the project to SourceForge at the suggestion of RichFaces lead developer Sergey Smirnov (no relation.) Exadel began developing the RichFaces JSF components library and Alexander joined the project as a framework background developer.
At the time it moved to java.net, Ajax4jsf had grown more useful when integrated with the RichFaces component library. RichFaces, however, was still not open source. The combined projects came to the attention of JBoss, which contracted with Exadel to open source both projects as JBoss projects. These were recently combined into a single project under the RichFaces name, available through JBoss.org. (RichFaces is combined with the JBoss Tools Eclipse-based developer environment to make up the JBoss Developer Studio subscription offering.)
Current activity for the RichFaces project includes a focus on building RichFaces functionality within JBoss Portlet Bridge. JBoss Portlet Bridge implements JSR-301 to provide support for not only JSF running in a portal, but also Seam and RichFaces.
Joining forces with JBoss has brought significantly more usage, ten times or more in terms of downloads. In particular, Alexander says there is an obvious increase in forum questions and discussions. In terms of attracting contributors, there are currently very few code contributions from the community outside of Exadel and JBoss. Alexander and Sergey describe the development process for the RichFaces team as being structured with a well-oiled process, which creates a higher barrier of entry for people outside of the team. As early ways to bring in external contributors, there are current needs for testing, defining future requirements, and requesting features and enhancements.
For the future roadmap of RichFaces, Alexander says that the next step is toward semantic web technologies.
This afternoon I caught a few minutes with Ivelin Ivanov, a lead developer on the Mobicents project. Mobicents is the first certified open source platform for developing and deploying JSLEE applications.
This audiocast is available from the JBoss.org podcast channel, in OGG and MP3 formats.
What’s funny is, the instructions are shorter than the title of this post.
su -c "rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-2.noarch.rpm"
su -c "yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk"
Read more about how to use EPEL. Fedora EPEL is a community run project to bring Fedora packages to Enterprise Linux users when the package is not included by Red Hat in an Enterprise Linux release. Read more on the Fedora EPEL wiki pages, including links to package view (i386, x86_64, ppc) per EPEL version (4, 5 to correspond with Enterprise Linux versions.)
Upon arriving I was immediately struck by how large and professional this open community conference is. CommunityOne seems indicative of what Sun’s developer audience might expect. A nice balance of spoon fed and gourmet buffet. Aside from doing final polish on my Fedora community presentation, I went to Benjamin Mako Hill’s talk on free culture and freedomdefined.org.
Currently I’m sitting in Jono Bacon’s talk on Ubuntu, and it’s amazing the thematic matches. People who really get community, the value of working with upstream, and treating community in the right ways. I think that, aside from logos, I could take Jono’s talk and give it about Fedora. Well, all except the Chuck Norris images.
Weren’t we all skeptical when Sun announced their intent to open source Java? But we’ve watched along the way, as they chose a good free/libre/open source software license (the GPL), as they opened the code Sun has a copyright to, and as they have embraced (to varying degrees) the community efforts, such as GNU Classpath and IcedTea.
It should be apparent that Red Hat is looking to put its bread where the open source butter is spread, in the acquisition of middleware powerhouse JBoss. As can happen with an acquisition, that propelled Red Hat even further into the Java camp. Yet is has been several of the long-time Red Hat engineers who are also responsible for leading and coding on open source projects that enabled all this to happen (GNU Classpath, IcedTea, gcj, and all around Eclipse, to name a prominent few.) What may have started as hedging the bet that Sun would follow through, all of this work has resulted in a stronger relationship across Java camps.
In a fair article on the freeing of Java, “Java fully open-sourced ‘by end of year’“, ZDNet quotes Sun that this year is going to see the end of all the remaining unfreeable parts of the JRE. What you think about that has to be balanced with what you believe. And this time, I find I’m believing that Sun can and will do it in 2008.
See you next week at JavaOne and CommunityOne. I’ll be there, on Monday talking about Fedora (and OpenJDK), and the rest of the week in the pavilion at the JBoss booth.
It has been more than a few years since Red Hat acquired
the gifted development team and assets behind Red Hat Directory Server and Red Hat Certificate System. Early in that relationship, Red Hat stated its intent to make the projects open source, with the Fedora Directory Server an early output of that work.
Adding to the experience of opening and running Fedora Directory Server and the new freeIPA initiative, the Dogtag team has licensed the entire certificate system as open source. Bob Lord announced it in his post:
… I’m extremely happy to announce the release of the Certificate System source code to the world.
This isn’t a “Lite” or demo version of the technology, but the entire source code repository, the one we use to build the Red Hat branded version of the product. It’s the real deal.
Our main wiki page will be here:
http://pki-svn.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/PKI_Main_PageIf you want to pull and build from source, start here:
http://pki-svn.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/PKI_BuildingIf you’re just interested in grabbing a pre-built binary, start here:
http://pki-svn.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/PKI_Install_Guide(More …)
If you are going to be at the April 2008 RSA Conference in San Francisco, Anil Saldhana invites anyone to stop by the Red Hat booth to chat about IPA, PKI, open source, etc.
Thomas Fitzsimmons updated the Fedora 9 release notes source pages to reflect that Fedora 9 would ship with OpenJDK 6 instead of the IcedTea implementation of OpenJDK 7. Fedora 9 (Sulphur) is due to release in May 2008.
OpenJDK Replaces IcedTea
The OpenJDK 6 packages (java-1.6.0-openjdk*) replace their IcedTea counterparts (java-1.7.0-icedtea*). The Fedora 8 IcedTea package tracks the unstable OpenJDK 7 branch whereas java-1.6.0-openjdk tracks the stable OpenJDK 6 branch. The decision to have OpenJDK 6 replace IcedTea was made for several reasons:
- Sun has replaced most of the encumbrances for which IcedTea was providing replacements.
- OpenJDK contributes ~99% of the code in the java-1.6.0-openjdk package.
- IcedTea’s mandate is to merge as much as possible with OpenJDK, so the differences between IcedTea and OpenJDK should diminish over time.
- OpenJDK 6 is a stable branch, whereas OpenJDK 7 is unstable and not expected to ship a stable release until 2009.
- Sun has licensed the OpenJDK trademark for use in Fedora.
- Shipping both OpenJDK 6 and IcedTea would have been confusing and would have added size to the distribution.
IcedTea continues to provide autotools support, a portable interpreter for ppc and ppc64 support, plugin support, Web Start support and patches to integrate OpenJDK into Fedora. The IcedTea sources are included in the java-1.6.0-openjdk SRPM.
OpenJDK 6 is not Java compatible. Work is underway to certify it as such.
http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/TheWebBeansManifesto
Read, think, learn, and don’t forget.
This interview is edited and republished from the original source.
A Dev Fu Interview with Andrew Overholt and Bryan Che
On 30 August 2006, Red Hat released version 3 of it’s Eclipse-based Red Hat Developer Suite of developer tools, the latest in a line of Red Hat Eclipse-based IDEs that goes back for several years. To find out more about the developer suite, what it does, how to get it, and why you’d want to we talked to Andrew Overholt, a Senior Software Engineer on The Eclipse Team, and Bryan Che, Product Manager for Developers at Red Hat. Here’s what they had to say.
