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 David Herron's Blog
OpenJDK Regression Test Harness, also known as jtreg, now available as open sourcePosted by robogeek on May 02, 2008 at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)Go to openjdk.java.net and scroll your eyes down to the Tools section of the navigation bar. You will see a link that's been there a long time, jtreg harness. There is new stuff behind that link now available. Today we have made this harness open source under the GPL+Classpath license combo. (Jonathan Gibbons' announcement) The OpenJDK Regression Test Harness, also known as jtreg, is the test harness used in the OpenJDK for running unit and regression tests. Jtreg is a wrapper around JT Harness which simplifies its use. Documentation is on the jtreg harness home page. How is this important? Previously jtreg had been available under the most liberal closed source binary license you could imagine. The license said you can do essentially anything you want with the binary jtreg distribution. No matter how liberal that binary license, it interfered with the ability of some Linux distros to make use of the unit and regression tests. I wish to thank the project members of these Linux distros for explaining the importance and distinction between the most liberal binary license you can imagine and a proper open source license. Once I groked the distinction it deepened my understanding of the open source culture. In the end what is important is that OpenJDK builds are as high quality as possible. Enabling the distro's to run the unit and regression tests help them have comfort in knowing the tests passed. Open media and open screensPosted by robogeek on May 01, 2008 at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)On an earlier blog posting a commenter asked: "I would like to know how to use the VLC media player stack as the media handler for OpenJDK.." so, yeah, I hear you, there are many asking for better media support in the Java platform. It's with interest that I read Adobe's announcement today of the Open Screen Project. Hey, cool, if you dig around there are documents describing the byte level details of the SWF and FLV and F4V formats. I feel as Nick Main does in 'SWF Spec is now less restrictive !' I've also thought it would be great to have a SWF player implemented in Java and using the newest graphics improvements in the latest JRE's. And, hey, the documents are right there that says in details what the SWF/FLV/etc formats are, especially as they are saying "removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications". We should be clear, however, that this appears not to be an open source announcement despite Adobe's use of the word 'Open'. Not being a lawyer the following is my best understanding - the documents are under a restrictive license that allows you to print the document once, and you cannot redistribute those documents. So the specification is openly published, as they say, but not open source. I couldn't find any software source code, FWIW. Java 6 for OS XPosted by robogeek on April 29, 2008 at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)It's been how long? Thank you Apple for getting this out! Anyway, Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1: This Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1 adds Java SE 6 version 1.6.0_05 to your Mac. This update does not replace the existing installation of J2SE 5.0 or change the default version of Java. Oh, and, 13949712720901ForOSX On hacking the OpenJDKPosted by robogeek on April 28, 2008 at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
I'm giving a session at JavaOne this year titled "Hacking the OpenJDK" and it's been very interesting sitting with this topic these last few months. Much of the presentation is an overview of the developer guide, source repositories and other infrastructure on openjdk.java.net which anybody 'hacking' the OpenJDK will need to get started. All that is pretty straightforward and obvious what to cover and how to present it. What's been interesting is what might be some common hacking scenarios with the OpenJDK code. My co-presenter is the one preparing the demos, and while we have some interesting demos lined up he wanted to know if y'all had any thoughts on "hacks" you'd like to see. The comment box below is available for y'all to leave us ideas. And please remember that we have 50 minutes for the session, 30 minutes will be taken with me talking through the OpenJDK project overview, leaving 20 minutes for demos and questions. The most interesting and most controversial idea in the session is: how to remove CORBA. I thought it's obvious, the most common change people want in the Java platform is to ditch CORBA. That is, unless you're one of the two people who actually use CORBA, I suppose. Feedback from colleagues was a "are you sure it's our party line to suggest making incompatible changes?" While that's a fair criticism I a) wanted to make it clear the OpenJDK is an open source project and any change is fair game, and b) that some changes create incompatibilities and that there is value in maintaining compatibility with the platform spec. In any case it's not too hard to hack the OpenJDK to remove CORBA, but I'll leave the details until my session at JavaOne. The session ID is: TS-5230 Interplanetary migrationsPosted by robogeek on April 25, 2008 at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)I've been subscribed to Planet Classpath and Planet JDK for a couple years. This blog has been aggregated into Planet JDK for a long time, and Planet Classpath was always a "them" aggregation. But, yeah, as Mark Reinhold says, we've been working closely together for awhile and as Mark Wielaard said we now have an ambassador from Planet Classpath in the Planet JDK team. As odd as it is to see my blog being aggregated into Planet Classpath, I welcome this change. May it lead to greater harmony in the movement to Free Java. Maybe all the Doctor Who episodes I've been watching recently has something to do with this interplanetary exchange. OpenJDK 6, tastes great, less filling!Posted by robogeek on April 24, 2008 at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)It seems the java world is in a bit of an uproar right now with a bit of news which I've seen blogged and newsed about in several places. First, Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04; not 'Hardy Herron' as some have been spelling it, sigh) was released this morning, and it does include the OpenJDK. This is part of a larger effort to have several of Sun's products integrated with Ubuntu, and Roman Stroble wrote about it in 'Java and NetBeans on Ubuntu 8.04'. It's really cool to see it there. Even though we've now had DLJ derived bundles in Ubuntu's Multiverse for 2 yrs now having real honest to goodness open source derived builds is so much better, and is a nice result to get to after the last two years of work since the initial announcement at JavaOne 2006. The goodness doesn't stop there as Fedora is still planning to include OpenJDK derived builds in Fedora 9. And there are some hints other distros are beginning work on OpenJDK builds. Perhaps it will be a tsunami as cgwalters suggested? I just think that with the opportunity now for any open source operating system to pick up the OpenJDK, that Java has a bright future in the open source world. "??Less Filling??" .. that's modern flotsom that popped into mind as I thought about the encumbrance issues. We are on the cusp of having the binary encumbrances cleared. While the OpenJDK represented a huge chunk of open source code, it was only 95% open source. The remaining bits coming from source we hadn't been able to open source. In the months since we've been working on replacement code or on gaining the rights sufficient to open source those encumbered pieces. And the last of those is on the verge of being resolved. 6u10beta is available.. please test it..!Posted by robogeek on April 16, 2008 at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)Recently we made Java SE 6 update 10 available for beta testing. Beta testing is a period in product release cycles where testing is taken to people outside the product team, and those "external" testers bang on it with their applications and let the product team know what's wrong (or not). There is a lot of exciting stuff in 6u10 (formerly known as 6uN) .. there is a lot more here than the typical update release. Unlike most update releases where the work is limited to critical fixes, for 6u10 the changes are pretty dramatic, will be affecting a lot of things, which leaves us wanting to hear about regressions or other kinds of bugs we may have created along the path of getting to 6u10. (um.. before the wags get ahold of what I just wrote -- any time you write new code it's common to write some bugs as well) Let's go over some of the new features:- Java Deployment Toolkit:- hooboy the description is pretty hairy but says a few interesting things. "allows developers to easily deploy applets and applications to a large variety of clients with JavaScripts.... makes it possible to automatically install Java Platform for Java Plug-in applets and Java Web Start applications. The script exposes a single object, named deployJava" and the deplyJava object has a buncha useful functions to reduce the complexity of deploying an applet across multiple browsers. The Java Kernel (FAQ) makes for a tiny Java platform which can be more quickly downloaded & installed while still allowing the full Java SE platform to be available, requiring downloads of missing pieces as required. The next generation Java plugin looks really cool and ought to drastically improve applet and javawebstart functionality and behavior. It is a ground-up reimplementation of the venerable plugin which uses a more intelligent architecture which immediately fixes several outstanding glaring bugs and problems. I think that while in most cases incremental improvements and bug fixes are good, there are times where it's better to just start over from scratch and that this is one of those times. The most critical part of 6u10 to test is this new plugin.
re: Into the lightPosted by robogeek on April 08, 2008 at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)I think 'Into the light' is the name of an album by Ian Anderson, who is also the a band that's too old to rock'n'roll and too young to die. Anyway it is also Dalibor's way of announcing something really kewl. I am so tickled to have the opportunity to work with him more closely, so here's a few thoughts .. In the pre-open source days .. the old days, back when we were arguing it wasn't necessary to open source the Java implementation .. to be honest I thought of Dalibor as a bit of a nuisance. Always asking embarrassing questions and I also thought the name 'Dalibor' had to be one of these made up screen names, and always wondered what his real name was. However over time we made our open source the Java implementation announcement. That made his questions less embarrassing, and I grew to know Dalibor, I learned that's his real name and I learned that he is a really nice guy with what I think of as an amazing approach to manifesting his vision for the world. Dalibor, welcome to the team. I predict great fun. Duchesses, FOSDEM, International Womens Day, and diversityPosted by robogeek on March 07, 2008 at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Clearly women are under-represented in software development jobs. What I did not know is that women are even more under-represented in open source software development. This is a little surprising given that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) stems from a yearning for freedom, but at the same time the FOSS community seems overly stereotyped to a male-dominated environment. They claimed that only 3% of open source developers are female. A bit of yahoogling turns up We assume FOSS benefits all equally. But does it really? and Ontario Linux Fest 2007 - Women In Open Source, Angela Byron (2007) and Opening doors to open source for women and linuxchix.org/ and Debian Women and Bridging the gender digital divide in FOSS and LXer Feature: Survival Tactics For Women In FOSS, part 1 ...etc... Why is this important? I think the clearest answer is one they gave -- diversity. Diversity of experience should probably lead to better solutions than if the people involved have a narrow range of experience. Diversity means having people of all kinds within an organization, of all races, genders, intelligence levels, interests, sexual orientations, etc. It's also kind of a strange situation -- there's nothing I can think of which makes men more suitable for software development than women. It's not a matter of upper body strength nor who can pee standing up. It's a matter of people possessing intelligence, the ability to conceptualize abstract thingymajobs, and describe those abstractions in software. Of course women are capable of these things. This reminds me of a blog posting by Lillian Angel last fall ... how are women supposed to feel comfortable entering this male dominated field knowing they'll just be hit on because they're the only woman in the room? Lillian was sitting in the room and it was funny when Mark, the Classpath project leader, recounted how some Classpath project members just assumed Lillian was a guy. Ah, shades of Neo meeting Trinity... ("You're Trinity..the Trinity? I always thought you were a guy... Most guys do") However there was an interesting angle to their presentation. The statistics presented were about percentages of software developers in software projects. However as in any endeavor there is more involved with creating a software project, whether it's FOSS or not, than just writing the software. Some critical pieces to a successful software project is documentation, testing, quality, marketing, graphics, logos, etc. Their claim is that while Women are under-represented in software development, they do tend to hold other jobs inside software org's like QA and documentation. I am struggling over whether this is good or bad or just is what it is. Yeah, that women tend to be under-represented in coding jobs is a concern and it would be great to even this out a bit, however in the bigger picture women are present in software development organizations. I wondered listening to their talk if they carried an idea that coding jobs have higher prestige or importance to the resulting software than the other jobs. In any case as tomorrow is International Womens Day I thought to assist making this issue more widely known. C U @ FOSDEM?Posted by robogeek on February 19, 2008 at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
The thing I'm pondering the most right now is under which model we can collaborate about Quality in the OpenJDK. The immediate issue is the OpenJDK 6 project, and clearly it is not (yet) beta quality and does not (yet) meet JCK6a conformance. The quality is pretty good but there are some known bugs and it would be nice to fix these. There is: Exchanging bug data up/down-stream .. test execution on OpenJDK, and sharing test results .. test development .. At FOSDEM I hope to discuss these and other ideas ... The end of the beginning of OpenJDK6Posted by robogeek on February 14, 2008 at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)I heard Joe Darcy use this phrase .. it's the end of the beginning .. so, yeah, that's about right. "The code is coming! The code is coming!" -- "The code is here!!" is the official announcement of something we have been working hard to achieve. The source drop for OpenJDK 6 is now available. See https://download.java.net/openjdk/jdk6/ This is a very early release, there are bugs, and if you build from these sources they do not yet produce a compliant binary. The latter is being worked on. Another recent related and important bit of news is the clearing of a major encumbrance .. [OpenJDK 2D-Dev] imaging and color classes binary plugs no longer needed (soon) discusses how we've recently gotten the rights necessary to relicense under the GPL the source for some classes critical to image and graphics rendering. The code is not yet in the OpenJDK6 release, we expect to get it there soon. This 'end' is just the beginning of a new phase, because there is more work ahead in this. We have made an important step, but we are on a journey and this is only one of the steps along this path.
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May 2008
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May 2008 Recent EntriesOpenJDK Regression Test Harness, also known as jtreg, now available as open source Articlesj1-2k7-mtW09: OpenJDK Quality Team Introduction and Discussion All articles by David Herron » | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
David Herron has worked for 7 years in the J2SE Quality Engineering team. He has developed test suites and GUI test automation tools, and was a co-author of the java.awt.Robot class. His prior experience is in development roles, in cross-platform GUI toolkits, and electronic mail systems. David graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1988.
Has it already been two weeks since FOSDEM? Gosh. Anyway, I had a great time there and I will probably post another blog entry based on my recollections. I want to mention specifically one of the sessions, the presentation by the 
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