Apache Geronimo: developing a free J2EE implementation

Posted Aug 5, 2003 19:22 UTC (Tue) by judge (guest, #6234)
Parent article: Apache Geronimo: developing a free J2EE implementation

Isn't having an open source java vm essesial to having j2ee or whatever?
It also seems like it's the most technicly complicated part of the puzzle.

Apache Geronimo: developing a free J2EE implementation

Posted Aug 5, 2003 19:45 UTC (Tue) by gstein (guest, #3612) [Link] (2 responses)

It is quite possible to run an open source J2EE server on top of proprietary JVMs. In fact, I'd think it would be quite common to run stuff on top of IBM's or Sun's JVM.

That said, there are open source JVMs such as Kaffe or Blackdown.

Apache Geronimo: developing a free J2EE implementation

Posted Aug 6, 2003 9:45 UTC (Wed) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry if I'm missing something, but is Blackdown really open-source? I've always thought that it is merely a Linux port of Sun's JVM...

Also, I've never seen a single serious piece of Java software (including free and prorietary) that would run with Kaffe. There are NO usable free JVMs out there, and in that situation I can't call anything depending on JVM truly free.

Apache Geronimo: developing a free J2EE implementation

Posted Aug 7, 2003 10:30 UTC (Thu) by Carl (guest, #824) [Link]

Sorry if I'm missing something, but is Blackdown really open-source? I've always thought that it is merely a Linux port of Sun's JVM...

You are correct. It is just a proprietary port of the original Sun VM.

There are NO usable free JVMs out there

Kaffe has seen huge improvements recently (check out their 1.1 release series, which they say are development snapshots, but which are really stable and usable.) But since kaffe the VM and class libraries is all GPL there is of course a problem when combining it into larger work if some of that is licensed under the Apache License, which isn't GPL compatible (at the moment).

gcj (the GNU Compiler for Java) also has seen great improvements recently. It is now possible (with some patches, but Red Hat provides RPMs) to run the Eclipse IDE with it (natively compiled even for amazing speeds!). And there is the rhug and the Naoko projects which have packaged large lists of free software written in the java language for inclusion in the next Red Hat release. (Ant, Tomcat, BCEL, apache-commons, xalan, xerces, struts, postgresql JDBC drivers, rhino, Jasmin, JUnit, CUP, BSF, etc.)