Will Webstart be integrated in OpenJDK?

[Andrew John Hughes]

2008/9/11 Clemens Eisserer <linuxhippy at gmail.com>:
> Hello,
>
>> I think OpenJDK is anything but dead
> As Dalibor already mentioned I was talking about
> jdk-collaboration.dev.java.net, not OpenJDK.

Yes.  I've never heard of this before and I guess most of the
Free Java hackers won't have.  Dalibor is one of the exceptions;
he seems to be kinda omniscient when it comes to Java stuff.

> JDK-collboration is basically dead, almost no-one uses it anymore and
> also Sun devs seem to ignore whats happening there.

Well my guess would be it's now deprecated, given OpenJDK exists.
Why would we need two, especially as I presume JDK collaboration is
a proprietary project?

>
> Yes, I know the webstart implementation integrated in IcedTea.
> However I've heard some rumors that it shouldn't take long until we
> see Sun's implementation open-sourced, so I don't want to work on code
> that will be replaced sooner or later.

Yeah, this issue is annoying and one of the areas where I think OpenJDK
is still failing as a community project.  If Sun have things like WebStart and
a plugin which are potentially going to drop from the sky, pretty much complete
at some random point, this inevitably causes issues with the external developers
who have no idea when this is going to happen and how feasible it is to work on
a replacement.

We've heard tell of a plugin over six months ago at FOSDEM. It's present in the
proprietary JDK apparently.  Yet it's still not surfaced in OpenJDK
with no news on what's
happened.  We can hardly carry on without plugin or webstart support for months
on end, in the hope that someday Sun will be benevolently release
their implementation.
Vendors like Red Hat need to be shipping such support to their customers now,
hence support is being developed in IcedTea.  It will be annoying when
Sun finally
do release their version but they've put the community in a position
where this can't be
helped.  The same happened with the binary plugs, and little seems to
have changed as yet.

> Furthermore I have already written some specific patches for Sun's
> implementation and well, nothing important just a few clean-ups - but
> as it seems at jdk-collaboration no one is watching at all.
>

Make sure they apply against OpenJDK and then mail them to the appropriate
list -- there are several to choose from :)

> lg Clemens
>

Cheers,
-- 
Andrew :-)

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