Kaffe Weekly News - 2002 Sep 7

Permanent web location: http://www.kaffe.org/weeklynews/2002/2.html

Headlines

I had a great response from last weeks newsletter. Over a thousand people read it. I'd especially like to thank Jonathon Corbet of the Linux Weekly News for linking to it.

I'm a bit slow getting the newsletter out this week. Normally, I'd like to see it out closer to the weekend, but things have been very hectic for me this week -- I just got a new job, at Digeo in Palo Alto, California! :-)

CVS Activity

There were a lot of big changes this week (mostly thanks to Dalibor):

Dalibor merged in the zip/jar file handling code from JanosVM. Since I'm not too familiar with the deficiencies of the old code, I'm not exactly sure what it fixes, but it does look much more complete and it implements a cache. (Changelog)
Dalibor implemented java.lang.Package and added support for packages to java.lang.ClassLoader (a 1.2 feature). It's a step on the road to getting full 1.2-style classloader semantics, which is also needed for 1.2-style security (more information). (Changelog)
Dalibor checked in a big patch against the java.io.* classes. The patch added a lot of checks for invalid arguments (eg. negative buffer sizes, using closed streams, etc.), and fixed a number of bugs, and added some synchronization where it was needed, plus all sorts of other improvements. (Changelog)
Dalibor implemented support for ISO3 country and language names, and locale specific country and language names (part of java.util.Locale). (Changelog)
Dalibor updated java.util.Calendar and java.util.GregorianCalendar to add support for dates before epoch start (1970). Use verbose constant names instead of numerical constants. Implemented computing dates using WEEK_OF_MONTH* and DAY_OF_WEEK. Modularized big methods into smaller ones. Added lots of comments. Cleaned it up in general. (Changelog)
Dalibor merged in a java.awt.AWTPermission implementation from PocketLinux. (Changelog)
Dalibor fixed the regression tests to use kjc by default (not jikes)
Pat checked in a modification to the ThreadInterrupt.java regression test to try to get it to fail instead of just hanging indefinitely.

Mailing List Activity

There was very little traffic on the mailing list this week, mostly just a few threads about compile problems continued from last week.

Some highlights:

jar problems reported fixed

Arne Woerner reports that he's no longer having the problems he experienced when trying to view the content of a jar file. I'm guessing that the new jar / zip code that Dalibor merged in from JanosVM fixed the problem.

kjc drops files in the wrong location?

Ross Burton reported that kjc was dropping files in the wrong location -- but neither Ito Kazumitsu or Muthuswamy R could duplicate the problem.

Patch Queue

This is the list of posted patches that should go in, but haven't yet, either because they need more work, or I just haven't had the time to look at them yet.

I had no spare time last week, so there are no changes.

ARM patch
MIPS / Playstation patches
fix gcc reordering of JNI functions with -O4

I've got go back through several months of my mailing list archives searching for uncommitted patches. Feel free to point out any patches I don't appear to be taking action on, and I'll add them to the list. I've probably just lost them or have procrastinated for too long.

New Bugs

The following bugs need to be "swept" into FAQ.Known-Bugs:

None.

Note: I've got a lot more bugs saved in my email folders - it will take me some time to write them all up and organize them.

Resolved Bugs

The following bugs need to be removed from FAQ.Known-Bugs:

None.

Ongoing Work and Sightings

This is a little section where I'm going to spotlight some of the ongoing work. Please tell me what you're up to, and I'll list it here.

New Listings:

Mark Wielaard is planning to do some work in getting Kaffe to work with GNU Classpath

Ongoing Listings:

Dalibor Topic has been doing most of the work lately. He's working on updating Kaffe to Java 1.2 classloader semantics and security features, and has been merging bits of the JanosVM and PocketLinux work back in. He's also been doing quite a bit of QA work in identifying bugs and fixing them, including a lot of Mauve work.
The JanosVM project, which is based on Kaffe, is very active at the moment, and a lot of good things are coming out of it. Tim Stack and Pat Tullman have been very helpful.
Robert Gonzalez is working on a bytecode verifier implementation for Kaffe as part of his thesis
Svante Arvedahl is doing his Master's thesis on implementing an IA-64 JIT for Kaffe. Gwenole Beauchesne has already gotten the interpreter to work for IA-64
I heard from Dalibor that Kiyo Inaba was working on trying to get some of the PocketLinux SuperH stuff merged in.
Dalibor also mentioned that Andrew Dalgleish is working on integrating the BDBJ debugger into kaffe, which would be very cool.
Kevin Kissell is doing some work to try to get Kaffe working well again on MIPS
Dylan Schell ported Kaffe to the PlayStation 2
Abdeslam BENZEGHIOUA is trying to get Kaffe to compile on eCos, and could use some help. I'd love to see some eCos patches in the main tree so we could say it was supported.
Mark Juszczec is trying to port Kaffe to the Helio PDA
Grzegorz Prokopski is a Debian developer, and is going to help me try to get some clarifications on how the GPL licensing of Kaffe works, and whether or not it can legally be used as the basis for Debian's efforts to get more free Java applications into their main distribution
Godmar Back is one heck of a resource, I'm glad he's on the list, because he knows a lot more about Kaffe than me. :-)

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of people. Tell me what you're doing, and I'll add you to the list!

Documentation News

No documentation news this week.

Website / Server News

The server still isn't moved yet. I've got a few more links and screenshots for the website, but I didn't have time to work on it this week.

Other Virtual Machine and Java News

There are a lot of interesting developments going on in the free software and virtual machine space. I'd like to highlight some of them here:

Sep 4 - Jikes RVM - (Announcement) - News from the Jikes RVM Project (Tutorial, Core team, Teaching info, Funding possibilities)

Sep 4 - Wonka - Here's a nice post from Chris Gray describing garbage collection in Wonka.

Sep 2 - DotGNU Portable.Net 0.4.4 Released - (Announcement)

Sep 1 - GNU Crypto 1.0.0 - (Announcement) - Here's a description of how it relates to the JCE (Java Cryptography Extension). It sounds like a similar project to BouncyCastle)

Aug 30 - FLEX Harpoon development alpha - Here's a description of the project from C. Scott Ananian.

Aug 28 - IKVM - This is cool, it's a JVM implementation for .NET by Jeroen Frijters. There are source and binary snapshots available.

Aug 23 - Mono 0.15 Released - (Release Notes) - It's really coming along, by the looks of things.

Aug 22 - Aegis VM 0.1.1 Released - (Announcement)

Jul 28 - Classpath / ORP - Gansha Wu from Intel posted a big patch that enables ORP to run the ECPerf and Java Petstore benchmarks on JBoss/Tomcat (a major accomplishment).

Jul 15 - Jupiter 1.0.0 beta Released - I saw Patrick Doyle's presentation on it at JVM'02, it looks quite interesting.

Kaffe Weekly News is edited by Jim Pick.

Do you have anything you'd like to see in next week's newsletter? Send them in to me a weeklynews@kaffe.org

For more information on Kaffe, see http://www.kaffe.org/

Here's a link to the previous week's Kaffe Weekly News