Beans Binding and Swing Application Framework

Some bookmarks on articles I have to read about two Java JSR that will easy the Swing development:

1. Beans Binding
   • JSR 295: Beans Binding
   • Beans Binding on java.net
   • Scott Violet's Blog: Ease of Swing Development - Beans Binding
   • Shannon Hickey's Blog: Beans Binding 1.0 Released
   • JSR 295 Beans Binding Hits 1.0 on InfoQueue
   • Beans Binding (JSR 295) & Properties on JDK7 on JavaLobby
   • Stephen Colebourne's Weblog: Java 7 - Update on Properties
2. Swing Application Framework
   • JSR 296: Swing Application Framework
   • Swing Application Framework on java.net
   • An Introduction to the Swing Application Framework API (JSR-296) on java.net
   • Swing Application Framework (JSR 296) on JavaLobby
   • Article Using the Swing Application Framework (JSR 296) on java.sun.com

NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard

I've just signed the petition: http://www.noooxml.org/petition.

Argouml in Debian

My last upload of ArgoUML was 14 October 2005. Since that time, I tried to build ArgoUML from sources each time a new release was on out. Unfortunately, ArgoUML was using the MDR module from NetBeans and this module is not yet in Debian and this module uses the JMI api which is under the Sun's binary license. I first rewrote the API (just some interfaces) under the GNU/Classpathx project so I could package the api for Debian.

Now, after uploading new releases of libgef-java and libtoolbar-java, I'll have a look at mdr and also the mdrant task which is requiered to build ArgoUML.

It was the first package I worked for in Debian and as always been the more complicated to build!

Note that I already resolved a lot of bugs and marked them as pending as they are solved in the pkg-java's svn repo.

IcedTea available for testing in Debian

Thanks to doko and man-di, IcedTea the project to free OpenJDK completely is coming to Debian... Read the announce on debian-java

Java TCK available to OpenJDK implementations

A post from Andrew Haley that explain the position of most (IMHO) free software developers about the decision of Sun. Other GNU Classpath friends blog about it (you can read some on planet.classpath.org and welcome the move of Sun about the license of the TCK... but in the current state, gcj, kaffe, aka VM's not based on OpenJDK; or Harmony, aka VM's not under GLP, can't use the TCK.

See also the posts of Dalibor Topic and the one from
Roman Kenke. It's interesting to also read the response of Simon Phipps. It's another proof that Sun is really involved in the "Free Java" process. Even if some process could be faster, even if they have a very different way of working (Free software is often more "public"), they are doing a real good work.

I'd like to point the work of Gary Benson on porting OpenJDK to ppc! Being able to build OpenJDK on powerpc if very appreciated (at least by me! ;-)).

Java TCK available to OpenJDK implementations

A post from Andrew Haley that explain the position of most (IMHO) free software developers about the decision of Sun. Other GNU Classpath friends blog about it (you can read some on planet.classpath.org and welcome the move of Sun about the license of the TCK... but in the current state, gcj, kaffe, aka VM's not based on OpenJDK; or Harmony, aka VM's not under GLP, can't use the TCK.

See also the posts of Dalibor Topic and the one from
Roman Kenke. It's interesting to also read the response of Simon Phipps. It's another proof that Sun is really involved in the "Free Java" process. Even if some process could be faster, even if they have a very different way of working (Free software is often more "public"), they are doing a real good work.

I'd like to point the work of Gary Benson on porting OpenJDK to ppc! Being able to build OpenJDK on powerpc if very appreciated (at least by me! ;-)).

Original FLOSS first contact

KU group gives gift and lesson on alternatives (article). Instead of giving GNU/Linux cd's, they gave cd's with FLOSS to run on Windows. That's pretty cool to let people know that FLOSS is not just GNU/Linux.

Formation développeur web sous Linux à Liège

La prochaine formation Web Component Developer sous Linux pour demandeurs d'emploi (gratuite) aura lieu à partir du 2 mai 2007 place Delcour à Liège (épreuves de sélection le 27 mars 2007 à 9h):

Plus d'info sur le site officiel:
http://www.stefi.fapse.ulg.ac.be/formations/emploi/webco/

Ou sur le site Ressource-toi.org:
http://ressource-toi.org/annonces/webco/2007

Fosdem 2007

Organisation

Like last year, I did not help Pascal to manage the devrooms. I'd like to be more helpfull so as a lot of people I made a little donation and get a FOSDEM2007 t-shirt. The event was even better than last year (even if I think it's also cool last year except the wifi was not working last year).

This is the first time since 2004 that I don't meet Wouter! I hope we'll meet next Debian or FOSDEM meeting.

Women

Is it me or are there more and more women involved in open source? This is one of the great news form this year.

Famous People

This is the most famous picture I have since I played with Bjorn Borg when I was 10:

De 2007-02-fosdem

[large]

From foreground to background: Me, Tom Tromey (GCJ, Fedora, autotools, etc etc etc), Simon Phipps (Mister Open Source at Sun Microsystems). (Thanks to Stephane Meslin-Weber for taking the picture (and others). (You can't see them on the picture but there were DevJammers all around!)

OpenJDK: Wow to Sun!

Since the announce from Sun that they will Open Source Java and my complain about the way they did it in Debian (without even asking publicly to the Debian-Java team), they did a lot of progress. I and other members of Debian-Java had a lot of contacts with Tom Marble and we do still have a lot of contacts with him (he often comes to #debian-java).

The first things they did was to explain their point of view about the surprising announce and also listen to our complains and try to find a way to work with us (and it's not that easy, every Debian Dev can say that ;-)).

Second, they came with the strong staff from OpenJDK at the FOSDEM, crossing the Ocean for the whole weekend to exchange point of views with DevJam (GNU Classpath, Free VM's and all the distribution's java team). They did not come to say how they will do things, they came to find the better way to work in collaboration with the community!

Third, they prepared and managed the meeting in a very professional and deep way. They know the subject and when there is a gap, they did not try to provide a one way solution, but they proposed solutions and they were open to proposals.

Many thanks to the Sun's staff for the good work and I hope the collaboration will be successful for Sun and for Free Software.

Meetings

As usual, it was a super great pleasure to meet Mark Wielaard, Dalibor Topic, Michael Koch, Roman Kennke, Robert Schuster, those I already cite in this blog and others (those I forgot and those I did not know yet) ;-)

Thanks

Thanks to the FOSDEM team and to all the DevJammer's (include those from Sun ;-)).

Free Software in education

On July 10 my trainees started a project on Sourceforge called bibliotheque.

The training is about web development (Java, Perl, Python, Javascript, SQL) and the whole six month day time courses, they use Debian GNU/Linux (guess why ;-)) (well, some installed Ubuntu on their laptop).

The last big exercice is often a pain because they are looking for a job and they have a lot of interviews. So we decided the last project to be team oriented.

I have the idea to publish it on Sourceforge so they can learn all how to use Bug tracker, Subversion tools the way we do in Free Software. Also, it's amazing to see the enthousiasme of the trainees about a project that is published. Even those who are not 'so good coders' did a lot of things like documentation, logos, maintaining the MediaWiki website (french).

The web application they are doing is made with tools they'll use in companies: Struts, Hibernate; they also use patterns like DAO, MVC; and they'll try to integrate AJAX in the application. Congratulation to this group.

Everybody wants to open source...

It's strange to follow state of minds of big companies about open source (they rarely speak about Free Software but that's another story;-)). Dalibor Topic, Mark Wielaard and all friends from GNU Classpath spent a lot of time talking with Sun to try to open source Java (or even just be able to get the tools to make open source java virtual machines and API). They are some moves in that direction and people like Tom Marble is working hard to make Sun's JDK license DFSG compatible and integrate Sun's JDK in the Debian distribution. Robert Brewin, co-CTO of Sun Microsystems' software group, said: "I believe that we will have components of Java released into open source within the year," meaning by next June, Brewin said. "I think [release of] the whole thing will take a little bit longer." One more step.

Another amazing interview is the one of David Kaefer, director of Business Development, Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft who called the open source software movement a "very powerful force in the industry." He also wants us to believe that Microsoft will be more and more open... Wait and See ;-)

FOSDEM 2006

I was not a part of the devrooms team this year (like the last two years), Pascal did all the job! I was just a simple visitor and it's a very cool position. Mark already bloged about the Classpath's presentations, so you can find some interresting slides there.

Saturday (25th February 2006)

RMS

Excellent talk about the patent. As always, Richard Stallman has great images to explain complex things. I still can't understand all the GPL3 changes but I'll try to read some more articles about it.

Putting 'Free' into JFreeChart

The presentation from David Gilbert was very cool. I did not know JFreeChart and it is really cool! This is a very big project and it makes very beautiful charts. I'd like to find some charts to do just to use it!

Eclipse for GNU Classpath Development

Tom Tromey did a fantastic presentation again. I already saw his presentations past years and it was still excellent. He already tried to explain me how to set up this Eclipse/GNU Classpath setup on IRC but I missed the "Don't build automatically" hack. Everything should be on the Classpath's wiki.

Xen

A presentation by Ian Pratt, leader of the Xen Source project. I heard about this project but I didn't know that you could move an instance from a machine to another one! Amazing!

Sunday (26th February 2006)

I met Wouter in the bus but he lost his voice and asked me to introduce the speakers of the Debian room. I'm sorry for the three speakers I announced if it was not just as good as if Wouter did it. I wanna intend to the two conferences anyway.

Women in Free Software

I already wanna be at the talk of last year but I was in the Classpath devroom. Hanna M Wallach did a fantastic talk. I learned a lot of things and I know now that there really is a need of the debian-women project. I proposed her to put a phrase or a logo or something on the Debian-Java projects web pages and she seems to be pleased. Tonight, I went on #debian-women and it seems I did not understand nothing :-D. So maybe I'd better do nothing about this unless I understand what I could do to help.

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port

After the talk of Hanna, I introduced the kFreeBSD talk of Aurelien Jarno. I wanna listen to this talk because I completely don't know *BSD... I'm sorry but I don't know more. And I still don't know the difference with Linux and don't know why I should, as a simple user change to some *BSD port?

Debian-Java Meeting

After the kFreeBSD talk, I introduced the SLIND talk in the Debian Room, told Wouter that I go to the Classpath Devroom... and listen to the end of the talk of Christian Thalinger (CacaoJVM -- the site was down when I tried). Sorry Christian, I just don't understant these thing :-D

During the talk (or was this just after the talk of Robert about JamVM?), I went eating with Wolfgang Baer. We went back during the Christian's talk.

Then we had a Debian-Java talk (I should be writing down the summary of this meeting instead of blogging)... I'll send an email about the meeting, don't worry ;-)

Future of Classpath

It is the time when Mark ask everybody: What do you do? How can we help you? It's a great social/technical time when everybody listen carrefully to everybody. It's wonderful. Maybe it's the part I prefer in free software. I must say that I read some mailing lists before joining some project and the 'Classpath' (and friends) projects were the one I prefer because of that respect.

Then came the camera... A team came in the room to film us. They claim they were making a movie about Free Software. Funny ;-) I discussed a little bit with the woman that seems to be the director and she asked for my email (no, Hanna, it was not because she felt I am sexy ;-), nobody tells me 100 times I'm sexy ;-)). I told her I was not one of the main contributor but she just wanna talk about free software and understand how it works.

Closing Talk: The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop by Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh is an excellent speaker, I really enjoyed the presentation. A lot of humour, a lot of facts, it was really an excellent presentation. But Jeff, I still do not understand the Ubuntu business plan. I'm not a native english speaker and I did not understand a lot of jokes and some responses.

Back!

I messed up with my GSM, lost my PIN number or someting I don't know (I did it a thousand times!), I went to the shop today (Feb. 28) to be able to call again. I also went to the office and the alarm was on... I asked for the security guard (I did not want to take risks the day of my birthday: February 28th)... we found nobody but someone tryied to enter on Sunday.

I'll try to prepare some report about Debian-Java tomorrow. The report will be reviewed by Wolfgang and Michael and I'll send it on the debian-java list on Saturday or on Sunday.

First Xen experience

After the Xen presentation at the FOSDEM, I did want to test this wonderful concept. I google around and found a very good page: http://julien.danjou.info/xen.html. I did not read all the document and install and start configuring everything. The first problem was network. It was hard to know exactly what was wrong because the machine is on a NAT, behind a firewall and it's a friend/co-worker who manage it and he really block everything! :-)

I went to OTFC#debian-xen trying to find some help and chatted with 'jd_'... the author of the link above. Some of the best mistake where not configuring /etc/fstab, bad MAC Address, and change the tty1 entry with 'console' in /etc/inittab. Julien also gave me another very good documentation in french: http://wiki.gcu.info/doku.php?id=linux:xen.

The Xen experience is smashing! You have two independant Debian system (with two different IP's) on the same box! Maybe the experienced admins will laugh reading these lines, but I'm very impressed by my Xen experience.

Julien also invited me for a dinner on a wendsday evening because he said "I'm a winner" :-D.

Many thanks Julien.

Free Java Blog

Debian - GNU

This week must be cooler! I hope to work on GNU ClasspathX and my Debian packages to go on the Java Move to Main project!

Free Java

Nothing to add to the free-java blog of Tom Tromey!

gnujaxp will stay gpl+linking exception

Thanks to Julian Scheid who wrote the gnu.xml.libxmlj.transform classes (+ C code). He agreed the FSF to be the copyright holder of his classes and to change the license to GPL+linking exception! I'll work on patches this week so it'll be possible to sync GNUJaxp in GNU Classpath and SableVM.

No Free Java Plugin for Mozilla (at the moment)

I did respond to a frequently ask question about the java plugin in Debian. The question comes once a week on debian-powerpc so I did write a page to explain the evolution of the project of Michael Koch http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gcjwebplugin or an alternative with Konqueror. Happy reading: http://people.debian.org/~avdyk/no_free_java_plugin_for_mozilla.html