Java 7 Developer Blog

The interview is live here

Ben Evans and I recently spoke at the Scandinavian Developers Conference on Java 7 and polyglot programming on the JVM. We also had a fun afternoon on a panel discussing “Whether the community or the corporations will control Java in the future”. That discussion probably deserves it own blog post, but more interestingly we spent a long time talking to Henrik Stahl from Oracle.

Henrik is Oracle’s director of Java platform strategy – and an official spokesperson from Oracle, able to pronounce on behalf of Oracle regarding Java. Henrik was able to give us the following insights (some of which you may have heard before):

• Oracle is very committed to Java and sees it as essential to their future.
• An open, vibrant community is an essential part of that future, in fact it’s the community that’ll determine what standard technologies and techniques should go into the std platform (SE/EE).
• The JVM will remain open and free forever, and additional technologies will be incorporated and open-sourced as appropriate.
• Oracle is looking for willing partners in the community to engage and be part of the conversation – and they are listening.

Some other points:

• Oracle is a much larger company than Sun and will not rush out any communication which is “half-baked”. This leads to much longer response times, and so the community should not jump to conclusions just because Oracle hasn’t responded yet. They’re aware of the problem here and are trying to fix it.
• Oracle are trying to unify the licensing position around all Java products. This is taking time because Oracle do not have as many lawyers per capita as Sun did. Sun used several different licenses and disentangling is hard. Oracle are trying to simplify and be more open. The fun quote here was that “Oracle does not have enough Lawyers.”
• Oracle wants the JCP to evolve – the current form is being revised. There are some new JSRs coming which alter the JCP itself. For example, one of the changes that’s already been announced is that Expert Group discussions (except for the procedural arrangements of who’s free at what time / place for physical meetings) must be conducted in public.
• A lot of *really* neat JRockit technology is coming to OpenJDK. It’s going to take time, but some of the stuff which is coming is going to make the VM better than ever.
• Oracle are hiring in a number of areas, including people to work on the core language, VM and overall strategy.

Hopefully that helps you understand some of Oracle’s strategy going forward.

If you’re London based:

We’re hoping to get Patrick Curran (JCP Chair) to come and speak at an LJC event and kick off a practical program where _you_ can get involved in determining the future of Java and its ecosystem and help influence Oracle to make decisions that will benefit all of us in our working careers. Patrick will be able to speak specifically about the JCP in more detail – as that’s his specific area.

Cheers,

Martijn & Ben

Hopefully, by now, everyone knows that Apple joined the OpenJDK project last year. What does that mean?

• Apple will contribute the code that they used for their private Mac Java builds as GPL code to OpenJDK
• Oracle will take over the stewardship of the Mac port of Java
• Over time, the Mac platform will become a completely first-class citizen in the Java world

This is good news for Java developers who want to develop on Mac. It’s also good news for Mac users – as it means that, for example, the native Aqua look-and-feel will continue to be supported – so Java desktop apps on Mac will look lovely. I, for one, can’t wait to see what Nimbus look-and-feel will look like under native Aqua.

Over the last few days, there have been some developments – for example this wiki page, detailing the progress of the Mac port, has appeared. Buried at the bottom of the page is a link to a page where the open bugs for the Mac port are being publicly tracked (as they’re ported across from Apple’s internal system).

Development is focused around JDK 7 – the basic idea is to take a fork of the community-maintained BSD port, and add Apple’s code to it, to produce a Mac-specific port. Relevant bug fixes should be able to go both ways between the two related ports, where possible.

All of this is likely to take time, however. The official line from Oracle is that JDK 7 will GA with Windows, Linux and Solaris as first-class supported operating systems, and the Mac will release as soon as possible after, with the hope that at some point in the future updates for the Mac version will be released at the same time as other OSes.

This applies to the Oracle-supplied binary builds. Of course, the OpenJDK code (which Oracle regard as the reference implementation) will be available (and GPL) for anyone who wants to build their own binary.

Here at java7developer.com, we think that we could be looking at roughly a 3 month gap between Java 7 GA and a Mac release – so maybe October 2011 if all goes well. For now, we’re pretty happy running the community-provided OpenJDK builds. There are occasional problems with non-fatal X11-related exceptions clogging up standard out – due to some of the Mac’s uniqueness, but on the whole, it’s not bad at all for a pre-release product.

Have you tried any of the community builds? Let us know what you think in the comments.