Freies Vortragsprogramm (Do, 04.05.2006)

GNU Classpath - The Free and Innovative alternative to the java programming language

von Mark Wielaard (GNU Classpath)

Donnerstag, 04.05.2006, Saal 6.1, 16:00-17:00 Uhr

The goal of GNU Classpath is to provide an Free Software implementation of the core class libraries for the java programming language. Because Free Software grants developers, users and researchers the freedom to adapt it to their needs, GNU Classpath has become a catalyst for innovative runtime and compiler projects. It also provides GNU/Linux distributions a way to bundle application written in the java programming language based on full source code and free tools.

GNU Classpath is used by a large collection of runtimes, compilers and tools. Therefore, the library must support execution environments with rather diverse, sometimes even conflicting design goals. Examples include the GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ), part of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), which is an ahead-of-time compiler, producing object files which can be linked with C++ code; Kaffe, a traditonal byte code interpreter and JIT compiler; the IBM Jikes Research VM (RVM), which is completely written in the java programming language itself; IKVM.NET, which translates java bytecode to the .NET Intermediate Language as used by Mono; and JNode, a full Operating System written in the java programming language. The collaboration of these very diverse projects on a common core library has made GNU Classpath a very robust and extensible library.

One of the attractive features of the core library is that it supports a very rich set of facilities. It provides Free Software developers a reasonably well designed, object-oriented framework that covers most needs of a typical application. The support ranges from abstract data types to graphical user interfaces, from low-level network abstractions to remote method invocation with over-the-network class loading, from mathematical libraries to database access. We will show how compatible GNU Classpath is compared to other 1.4 and 1.5 JDKs, how we maintain correctness, completeness and compatibility, and what the targets for the near future are.

In the last couple of years various GNU/Linux distributions have started to bundle applications based on GNU Classpath. A very diverse set of applications and tools are now supported like office suites (OpenOffice), development environments (Eclipse), peer-to-peer applications (Azureus), application servers (JOnAS and Tomcat). We will give a small overview of the tools and applications available now and what the requirements and compatibility issues are to get your own program written in the java programming language included in the major GNU/Linux distributions.

Über den Autor Mark Wielaard:

Mark Wielaard studied Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam working on functional and logic programming languages. In the past he has worked on GNUJSP and servlet libraries and currently helps with the GNU Compiler for the java programming lanauge (GCJ) and kaffe projects.

In 2000 he joined GNU Classpath and since 2003 he is the GNU maintainer and release manager of that project.

Mark also wrote the The Hunting of the Snark project, an implementation of the BitTorrent protocol with GCJ and the java-gnome bindings.

He has given presentations on GNU Classpath at conferences in Brazil, America and Europe and loves meeting people who have integrated GNU Classpath in new and wonderful ways.

He currently lives in Enschede, the Netherlands.