burek for breakfast

I'll be speaking at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany on JDK 7 Updates in OpenJDK. When I'm not speaking, I'll be mostly be around at the Oracle booth on Wednesday & Thursday.

See you there!

Luckily, we are getting help. The London Java Community has done a great job of pushing along information about how to do builds and providing very constructive and timely feedback on these topics. And there’s a developer from SAP named Volker Simonis who has done a fantastic job at documenting his own experiences building OpenJDK on a number of platforms. There are lots of stars in the community, but we’re always looking for more!

Donald Smith, Director of Product Management in the Java Platform Group at Oracle, in an interview for the latest edition of the Java Magazine.

As Edvard Wendelin announced on the jdk7u-dev mailing list, the source code bundle corresponding to the JDK 7 Updates jdk7u/jdk7u4 Mercurial forest is now available for download.

Happy packaging!

I don't do github pull requests.

github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a
valid email address for the person asking me to pull. The diffstat is
also deficient and useless.

Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github
instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version.
As a result, I consider github useless for these kinds of things. It's
fine for *hosting*, but the pull requests and the online commit
editing, are just pure garbage.

Linus Torvalds commenting on a GitHub pull request to the Linux kernel.

We now have a download page on java.net to host preview builds from Oracle:

http://jdk8.java.net/jigsaw/

This should be useful to those that want to try out Project Jigsaw and/or the current prototype of the modular JDK without needing to build it themselves.

Alan Bateman in a post to the jigsaw-dev mailing list.

When the SAP Java Virtual Machine team decided to join the OpenJDK project last year, they first of all wanted to understand the overall direction and governance structure of the project. After Volker Simonis and other team members contributed a few bug fixes and minor enhancements, they quickly observed that their contributions were not only welcomed, but that there are many similar interests among the different OpenJDK project members - the most important one being to protect the future of Java. What a bold statement ... in practice this means that through active participation and contribution from a broader group of participants, the work can be shared and innovation for the Java platform can jointly be defined by means of one standard implementation.

Based on this experience, SAP today decided to significantly incresae its contributions. Please read Volker Simonis' blog post on the OpenJDK mailing list about a new project proposal. We now plan to contribute whole platform ports in a belief that it is economically better to standardize our own implementation than to keep it proprietary. The first platform port that we are going to contribute is Linux on PowerPC. Based on that, we will work together with IBM and others and also use it as a basis for the AIX on PowerPC port. Depending on the outcome, other ports for other platforms might follow.

Claus von Riegen, Vice President Industry Standards and Open Source at SAP, in a blog post titled Protecting the future of Java.

I'll be speaking at JUG Karlsruhe on Wednesday, May 9th on JDK 7 Updates and JDK 8.

See you there!

In the last episode of the Java Spotlight podcast, we interviewed Henrik Ståhl, Senior Director of Product Management in the Java Platform Group at Oracle on the latest release of Java SE 7.

As usual, you can grab just this episode or fetch the whole feed.

On Java.com:

Java SE 7 Update 4 will be the first consumer release of the Java 7 JRE, scheduled to be made available as the default version on Java.com starting on May 1, 2012.

In Fedora 17:

Java 7 (OpenJDK7) is the default Java runtime and Java build tool set.

In Ubuntu 12.10:

Please note that OpenJDK 7 will become the default Java implementation in Ubuntu 12.10.

At Jelastic:

We decided to try something new. We made Java 7 the default choice this month and, as you can see, it made a huge difference in JVM popularity.

OpenJDK 7 (closely aligned to Oracle Java 7) is avaliable in Universe.
Please note that OpenJDK 7 will become the default Java implementation in Ubuntu 12.10.

Taken from the Precise Pangolin release notes.