Java in Ubuntu

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 04:55:45PM +0100, Remy Maucherat wrote:

> I read the wiki here: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/JavaIntegration
> 
> What is the status exactly ? I see Sable 1.1.8 in main, which I
> tested. It lacks some basic stuff (http://sablevm.org/bugs/104), so
> upgrading to the latest (1.1.10) would be needed to get something more
> than a toy JVM. The maintainer was very helpful, and a JIT seems to be
> nearly there :)

The status is that we don't be able to do as much as we would have liked for
the Hoary release, due to a late start on Java functionality.

> Kaffe runs server applications nearly out of the box (usually, startup
> scripts tweaking are needed, although I have been told fixes have been
> made recently), and has a reasonably fast JIT. One thing I like over
> the non free VM is the moderate resource usage. I suspect portability
> issues made Sable a better choice for Ubuntu.
>
> For client applications and server applications which will run very
> little user code (this means no application servers), gcjing seems the
> best solution.
> 
> What was the official decision in the end ?

Our strategy should be quite clear from the content on that wiki page:

    * The default Java VM should be gij
    * The default Java compiler should be ecj
    * Java libraries should be compiled to native code using gcj where it works
    * We don't currently have a solid open source option for a browser plugin, but are investigating options to bring gcjwebplugin up to par

-- 
 - mdz