[kaffe] GNU Classpath & friends meeting during Fosdem 2006

[Mark Wielaard]

GNU Classpath & friends meeting during Fosdem 2006.

The various free software library, runtimes, compiler and tool
projects around GNU Classpath will meet in Brussel to discuss what has
happened in the last year in the Free Software community and what the
next year will bring us during Fosdem.

The 6th edition of FOSDEM (Free and Opensource Software Developers'
European Meeting) will take place on February 25+26 2006 in Brussels
(Belgium), at the Solbosch Campus of the ULB (Free University of
Brussels). FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event for the community
and organized by the community. See http://www.fosdem.org/

The program will be as follows:

- Saturday from 13:00 to 17:30 - "End-User talks"

  Presentations that show what cool stuff can be done with the Free
  Stack right now.

  - Putting the 'Free' into JFreeChart
    Dave Gilbert, JFreeChart Project Leader

    A review of the efforts to make JFreeChart work with GNU
    Classpath-based runtimes, including a brief history, a demonstration
    of the current state (using the java bindings for Cairo), and an
    overview of the work that remains to be done.

  - Using Eclipse for GNU Classpath development
    Tom Tromey

    Learn how to setup a fully working development environment based
    on GNU Classpath in Eclipse that can be used to bootstrap the full
    free toolchain (and can be used to run Eclipse itself) in just 10
    minutes. 

  - Eclipse RCP and GCJ/GIJ
    Wayne Beaton

    Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) is a runtime platform for
    delivering your Java applications on multiple platforms. RCP is far
    more than just a windowing toolkit; it is rich client "middleware"
    that provides a comprehensive framework for building and deploying
    applications that are modular, extensible, and updatable. The kinds
    of applications you can build with Eclipse RCP are limited only by
    your imagination. During this talk, we will discuss how the Eclipse
    RCP can be used in conjunction with the Eclipse Eco-system and
    GCJ/GIJ to build high quality applications.

  If there is time at the end of the day we would like to do a
  Show-And-Tell where people do quick Demos of applications running on a
  completely free stack. Ideas and suggestions welcome.

- Sunday from 09:00 to 13:00 - "Developer talks"

  Presentations of (core) libraries and runtimes that are in progress,
  made a lot of progress in the last year and are in active development.

  - Free Swing, past, present and future
    Roman Kennke

    An overview of that state of Free Swing one year ago, what has been
    done in the meantime, what still must be done and which applications
    work now.

  - The Free CORBA comes
    Dr Audrius Meskauskas

    If the Free world does not want to step back in the battle, we need
    a complete set of the Free tools for advanced communication over
    the network. For our CORBA implementation we needed:

    1. Free. No classes with restricted license.
    2. Fully workable, interoperable and pass tests, recognized by
       the CORBA user community as serious (we needed to find a well
       known Free testing suite).
    3. Properly commented, being ready for the long life in the Free
       world.
    4. No pressure to use the outdated approaches.
       CORBA 3.0.3 and jdk 1.5.

    To reach these goals, we have chosen for implementing a clean room 
    implementation, using the published standard specifications only.
    During the recent year of the GNU Classpath development, this goal
    is in large degree achieved. The important directions of future
    development could be providing features that are outside the scope
    of the both CORBA standard and Sun API, but included in the near all
    proprietary implementations (SSH, HTTP and other bridges, get rid of
    rmic code generator for RMI/IIOP, fault tolerant behavior, reduced
    the footprint and others).

  - The JamVM runtime
    Robert Lougher

    An overview of the JamVM virtual machine, with comparisons to other
    GNU Classpath runtimes, and a section on the VM interface.

  - Integrating Vmgen-based interpreters
    Christian Thalinger
  
    Vmgen is a tool for writing efficient interpreters. The Cacao
    runtime recently added a Vmgen based interpreter in addition to
    the JIT engine.

- Sunday from 14:00 to 17:30 - "The Future"

  Interactive technical hacker discussions on how to integrate
  the projects more and move forward in the next year.

  - State of the world, beyond japi
    Mark Wielaard, GNU Classpath Maintainer

    After a short overview of the various free stacks, libraries,
    compilers, tools and runtimes this session is mostly open discussion
    about what work remains to be done and how to integrate the various
    efforts better. Ideas for work items welcome.

We hope to see you in Brussels on February 25 and 26 2006, If you have
suggestions or ideas for the demos and discussion sessions please
contact us at fosdem at developer.classpath.org.

Arnaud, Dalibor, Mark, Michael and Tom

-- 
Escape the Java Trap with GNU Classpath!
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html

Join the community at http://planet.classpath.org/