We've all heard the news: JBoss has received $10 million in funding and now
it's time to sit back and mull it over. Without a doubt this infusion of
capital is a signal of confidence for JBoss Group. But is this investment a
good thing for open source? Not an unimportant question for those of us who
have decided to use open source in our enterprise applications. If
organizations are just now deciding to use open source, this announcement
could cause them to rethink their decision and weigh the possibility that
their choice may not be so open as it has been. We do have a few exemplars
that we can draw from to help us understand what could happen. The most
obvious are IBM alphaWorks, the Apache Foundation, and the various Linux
vendors, some of whom have IPOed.
alphaWorks is home to a number of open source projects. We don't hear about
this IBM-funded effort as much ... (more)
By necessity, the operating system loads each VM into its own separate
process slot. Consequently, each VM is forced to duplicate the other's
initialization efforts and resource allocations. Specifically, each VM is
required to load the JDK core classes into their respective heap spaces.
Running several Java applications in the same VM would eliminate this
duplication of effort. There's an analogy in the world of operating systems.
System engineers have long recognized that portions of statically linked
executables contain read-only text that's potentially shareable. They knew
t... (more)
Up till now, changes to Java have been pretty much constrained to APIs and
the inner workings of the Java 2 platform. All of this will change once the
JDK 1.5 has been released. The extent of these changes was revealed in a
recent interview with Joshua Bloch (http://java.sun.com/features/
2003/05/bloch_qa.html). As illuminating as the interview was, it left me with
a number of questions, so I started to search for answers by reading JSR 201.
If you read this JSR, you'll find that it doesn't include a critical
discussion of the proposed changes, nor is there any supporting document... (more)
The JRockit engineers made two assumptions when they first designed JRockit.
First, server VMs run for a long time and, second, memory is cheap and
plentiful. This motto still rings true in BEA's offering of the 8.1 (J2SE
1.4.1_03) version of this product. And, unlike the more familiar JVMs, this
VM comes with a face.
Acquiring and Installing JRockit
JRockit runs on the MS Windows and Red Hat Linux platforms and is available
in a 25MB download. The install was as uneventful as all installs should be.
As expected, the directory structure followed the standard JDK/JRE structure.
T... (more)
In a very brief 8 months Aaron Williams, spec lead for the largest expert
group currently functioning in the JCP, guided the group to a consensus on
the next version of the JCP.
Highlights of the next-generation JCP include processes to increase
transparency, encourage broader participation, and improve overall efficiency
of the process while support specification leads. In addition, it offers
resources to reduce the burden on the spec leads.
"We want to involve more people sooner" said Williams in a recent interview.
This version of the JCP opens up the first review period to all... (more)
Kirk Pepperdine has more than 10 years of experience in OO technologies. In edition to his work in the area of performance tuning, Kirk has focused on building middleware for distributed applications.
David Lucas
Cathy Lopez
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
