Announcing Finalists for the OpenJDK Community Innovator's Challenge

[Rich Sands]

OpenJDK Community,

We're pleased to announce the finalists for the OpenJDK Community Innovator's 
Challenge. The judges have been meeting and discussing the 18 proposals received 
during the first phase of the Challenge, and evaluating these proposals based on 
their technical merit, and their likely impact on the OpenJDK Community and the 
adoption of OpenJDK-based implementations in new markets, for new applications and 
uses. It was not an easy decision, as most of the proposals were thoughtful and 
demonstrated passion and commitment to this code base and the community. The seven 
Finalists, in order of receipt of their proposals, are:


Closures for Java                                    Neal Gafter

Implement XRender pipeline for Java2D                Clemens Eisserer

Provide date and time library from JSR-310           Stephen Colebourne,
                                                      Michael Nascimento Santos

Portable GUI backends                                Roman Kennke, Mario Torre

Virtual Machine Interface                            Andrew John Hughes

Free Software synthesizer implemention for
the OpenJDK project                                  Karl Helgason

OpenJDK on Windows                                   Ted Neward


The judges, all Sun employees, are Alan Bateman, Alex Buckley, Danny Coward, Joe 
Darcy, Ray Gans, James Gosling, Onno Kluyt, Jim Melvin, Alex Potochkin, Phil Race, 
Mark Reinhold, and Rich Sands.

We want to thank everyone who has entered their proposal into the Challenge. It is 
very exciting to see the level of enthusiasm and interest among developers for the 
OpenJDK code base. The finalists were chosen based on the completeness and relevance 
of their proposals and the degree to which the judges felt the end results were both 
achievable and valuable to the community at this time. Proposals that were not 
selected as finalists are still valuable and interesting but Sun could not select 
them all! The judges hope that everyone who has participated so far in the Challenge 
will consider continuing their efforts in the Community, and collaborating with their 
peers and with Sun to further the goals of the OpenJDK project.

One other thing to remember -- there is no guarantee that completed Challenge 
projects will be integrated into the main OpenJDK code base, or into the Java SE 
Platform specification (which is governed by the JCP). Being chosen as a Finalist or 
completing a project for the Challenge might help to demonstrate the feasibility of a 
particular API or language proposal but it does not say anything about the likelihood 
of such a project becoming an approved JSR, or about the code being integrated into 
the main branch of the OpenJDK code base. Both the spec and the code are managed 
under processes that are separate from the Challenge.

The finalists will be notified and project space set up for them if needed in the 
OpenJDK Community. As required by the Challenge rules, work must be done in the open, 
and the entire OpenJDK community is welcome to watch and comment as the projects 
progress. The Innovators Challenge will close on August 4th at which time each 
project will be reviewed to verify that it met the completion criteria of its 
proposal. Cash prizes will be awarded shortly afterwards.

Thanks again to everyone who has participated. Good luck to all Finalists on your 
projects!

Regards,

     --  rms

-- 
Rich Sands                     Phone: +1 781 881 4067 / x81524
Community Marketing Manager    Email: richard.sands at sun.com
Java SE Marketing              SMS: 6172830027 at vtext.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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