A shamei [LWN.net]

A shamei

Posted Apr 7, 2005 10:40 UTC (Thu) by faassen (guest, #1676)
In reply to: A shamei by zooko
Parent article: GCJ - past, present, and future

There is *plenty* Java-based open source software out there. Many of the Apache projects are java-based, for example:

http://www.apache.org/

Here's another vast amount of Java-based open source software:

http://www.objectweb.org/

Anyway, I suspect that pointing you to any number of Java based free software projects won't help convince you, but I thought I'd give it another shot.

Note that I'm not even a Java programmer myself (Python is my language of choice). But some of these Java-based projects have plenty of visibility.

to post comments

A shame

Posted Apr 7, 2005 12:36 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (3 responses)

As the original article said, "Very little of Free Software is written in Java, aside from what might be used by those already obliged to use Java". Certainly Java coders are writing lots of code for their own use -- scratching their own itch, not that there's anything wrong with that -- but very little of it escapes to the wider world. Instead of counting defunct Sourceforge projects, try counting packages in the distribution you're running right now, omitting compilers and libraries. You'll find thousands of C, hundreds of C++, and a bare handful of Perl, Python, Scheme, OCaml, and what-have-you. That is as it should be.

Lists of packages

Posted Apr 7, 2005 13:07 UTC (Thu) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] (1 responses)

try counting packages in the distribution you're running right now, omitting compilers and libraries. You'll find thousands of C, hundreds of C++, and a bare handful of Perl, Python, Scheme, OCaml, and what-have-you. That is as it should be.

I think that is a fair comment. Compared to the rest of the GNU system the support for the java programming language is just maturing. For the free software distributions we will certainly rely on the more traditional languages for years to come.

To see what we get from adding support for the java programming language to the different distributions you can take a look at:

Mostly compilers and libraries at the moment.

For writing new free software desktop applications in the java programming language I would recommend looking into the java-gnome bindings. Then you can hook up with much more traditional free software libraries. Not just Gnome/GTK+, but also cairo, dbus, gstreamer, etc.

Lists of packages

Posted Apr 7, 2005 23:54 UTC (Thu) by Xman (guest, #10620) [Link]

Compared to the rest of the GNU system the support for the java programming language is just maturing.

Agreed. That's exactly why gcj4 is good news.

A shame

Posted Apr 7, 2005 18:06 UTC (Thu) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link]

I've been working for nearly 10 years now on a GPL'ed program, in Java, for managing changes to directory services.. see http://www.arlut.utexas.edu/gash2/. It's up to around 250k lines of code at the moment.

That web page hasn't been updated in awhile, but we've been extremely busy here working on 2.0, and we'll be "relaunching" it in the next month or two.

Got to get back to my xemacs window now, in fact.

A shamei

Posted Apr 7, 2005 12:44 UTC (Thu) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link] (7 responses)

Python is my current language of choice, too.

I just poked around on the two web sites that you gave me, and I honestly didn't see any code that I would want to use unless for some reason I were already required to use Java. I mean, there were dozens of projects, but as far as I could see they were all middleware, databases, development tools, and other infrastructural bits which are only there because someone somewhere decided that all of their infrastructure had to be rewritten in Java.

I can think of exactly two pieces of software which I might want to use that are written in Java:

1. The E language. http://erights.org/ Every time I play with E, I have another round of headaches because of the fact that it is implemented in Java. Fortunately there are several active projects to implement E in a different langage.

2. Eclipse. I haven't really used it -- I'm perfectly happy with XEmacs and affiliated tools at the moment -- but I can see how it might be nice.

So at the end of the day, I'm afraid that the final great result of all of the time and money spent on the free software java efforts will be that we can run Eclipse.

Oh yeah, and there's Limewire. That's three open source projects that are written in Java that someone might want to use even if they are not required to use 100% All Java by their pointy-headed boss.

I would be interested to hear about any more such projects.

Regards,

Zooko

A shamei

Posted Apr 7, 2005 14:17 UTC (Thu) by kfiles (subscriber, #11628) [Link] (2 responses)

<quote>
I can think of exactly two pieces of software which I might
want to use that are written in Java:
[...]
I would be interested to hear about any more such projects.
</quote>

Well, ones that I use everyday include Eclipse (great IDE for just about anything, from SQL to Java to C and C#), Azureus (hands-down best bittorrent client in any language, using SWT), pdftk (great PDF manipulation, using GCJ-compiled iText), javassh (only decent way I know to do web-server-proxied SSH), Galleon (very cool Tivo HME server), and Netflix Addict (cool http-scraped GUI client for managing Netflix queues).

These are all applications I chose because they were the best, or only way to accomplish a task, not because or despite of the fact that they were written in Java. Of these, only Netflix Addict suffers from obvious Swing maladies.

URLs:
http://www.eclipse.org
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jta/
http://galleon.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/HomePage
http://netflixaddict.sourceforge.net/

Thanks,
--kirby

A shamei

Posted Apr 7, 2005 14:25 UTC (Thu) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link]

Hey thanks, for the list! I'm glad there are at least a few useful Java apps.

A shame

Posted Apr 17, 2005 3:13 UTC (Sun) by jae (guest, #2369) [Link]

Azureus was why I installed Sun's Java. Tried to run it with kaffe et al first, but no dice. So I took the plunge (sad, sad day that was).

A shame

Posted Apr 7, 2005 14:42 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

There's pdftk, which my wife's cousin wrote, a PDF toolkit. Built with Gcj (as it is in Debian) it's relatively harmless.

A shamei

Posted Apr 7, 2005 15:20 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (guest, #3803) [Link] (1 responses)

How about OpenOffice.org? If Java helps them develop more features for it faster, and if they can run with gcj (and apparently they can, given what Red Hat is saying about FC4), more power to them!

Not to mention all the Apache projects that use Java. And a few games, like JRisk (no Linux native Risk game compares).

Seriously, I don't understand the aversion to Java. It really is a more productive language than C++. It likely has fewer potential patent problems than Mono. A solid native Linux Java compiler like GCJ can *only* be a good thing for Free Software.

OpenOffice.org 2

Posted Apr 7, 2005 23:55 UTC (Thu) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

How about OpenOffice.org? If Java helps them develop more features for it faster, and if they can run with gcj (and apparently they can, given what Red Hat is saying about FC4), more power to them!

The use of the java programming language in OpenOffice.org 2 was a big worry to a lot of people because the free alternatives for java, like kaffe and gcj, were not up to date enough to support everything the OpenOffice.org hackers wanted to do. So a lot of energy has been put into making sure GCJ 4 does support what the OpenOffice.org 2 build process requires.

You can follow the work of Caolan McNamara to see the progress. And Anthony Green posted a screenshot of OpenOffice 2.0 database application running on hsqldb with a fully Free gcj-based runtime stack on FC4test1.

A shamei

Posted Apr 7, 2005 18:56 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

I don't have any Java applications, but I've been seriously looking at:
- Freemind mind mapper (freemind.sf.net)
- ArgoUML UML modeler (argouml.tigris.org)
It's funny how most of the UML modelers seem to be done with Java (I mean
most, not the ones I use. I use Dia...).

There are also a few nice Java games out there. Some small ones you can
find from here: http://www.javaonthebrain.com/brain.html