fitzsim’s development log

awesome is awesome.

I’m very happy to see IcedTeaPlugin enabled by default in the Fedora 12 Live USB images. This wasn’t always the case — in the past space-savings arguments were made to exclude java-1.6.0-openjdk and java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin from Live images. I haven’t found out who’s responsible for the editorial change-of-heart, but to the people who made […]

My main interest in this release is seeing the LiveConnect work that I started in IcedTea finished and released. Deepak Bhole did an amazing job taking over where I left off — IcedTeaPlugin was prototype quality when I handed it over. He completed the major features and then polished the result into the […]

Red Hat Summit was great. I manned the Open Source Java booth on the show floor. There was a lot of interest in what we’re doing, and people were impressed to hear that the OpenJDK packages in Fedora pass the TCK. I showed a few IcedTea demos including IcedTea Web Start and […]

IcedTea 6 Mercurial tip configured with –enable-liveconnect on Fedora 9:

That’s a signed LiveConnect applet.

I’m planning two Fedora Features for OpenJDK in Fedora 10. I’ll write the Wiki pages soon.

Improved Multilib Support for JDK Packages

The first feature is improved multilib support for Java packages. This will involve fixing the darn persistent rpm scriptlet argument bug and adding multilib support to jpackage-utils and java-1.6.0-openjdk. I already have patches […]

OpenJDK 6 was released in Fedora 9. Yay! The name change is satisfying and it’s great to see the past 6 months’ efforts come to fruition. For me this isn’t quite as exciting as the release of Fedora 8, which was the first distribution release to include IcedTea packages, based on an […]

CommunityOne 2008

Monday, May 5

I thought my CommunityOne talk, The IcedTea Project: Developing OpenJDK for Deployment on GNU/Linux, went pretty well. The audience was small but full of important people Martin Buchholz introduced himself after my presentation and we chatted a little about Google’s plans to contribute to OpenJDK. After the talk […]

My FOSDEM talk was on IcedTea and LiveConnect. I’ve been working on a gcjwebplugin rewrite called IcedTeaPlugin on-and-off for the past five months. Whereas gcjwebplugin is a Netscape 4.x plugin, IcedTeaPlugin is an XPCOM plugin that implements OJI — the Open JVM Interface — for LiveConnect support. I showed two demos at […]

On Monday, I found Conkeror through the EmacsWiki. It’s a Firefox extension that provides an Emacs-like interface to the browser. It includes all the essential Emacs features (minibuffer, incremental search, bookmark tab completion, buffer management) and an additional killer feature: numbered links. I’ve always wanted an efficient way to follow links and […]