Will Webstart be integrated in OpenJDK?

[Mark Wielaard]

On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 16:34 +0100, Mark Thornton wrote:
> Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
> > On Sep 11, 2008, at 10:37 AM, Frans Thamura wrote:
> >> On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 9:18 PM, Onno Kluyt <Onno.Kluyt at sun.com> wrote:
> >>> We have not yet decided on a specific plan regarding open sourcing 
> >>> of the
> >>> plugin and webstart code. We may eventually add this to OpenJDK but 
> >>> it is certainly not imminent.
> >>
> >> the ads said that 100% OpenSource..
> >
> > To be fair, I don't think they are part of the JDK, are they?
>
> Given that the JRE is part of the JDK and the plugins and Webstart have 
> been installed with the JRE for many years (from the very beginning in 
> the case of plugins), I think it is hard to separate them in practical 
> terms.

Yes, users want to use them. That is also why we have included
gcjwebplugin as applet viewer and netx as webstart package with icedtea.
Deepack is now extending the IcedTeaPlugin to have full stable
LiveConnect support also, which is the most reported bug against the
openjdk/icedtea packages included with various GNU/Linux distros now.

For more info see the Fosdem presentation:
http://people.redhat.com/fitzsim/fosdem-2008/fosdem-2008-liveconnect.pdf
Which really has some nice technical details about the implementation.

Tom's blog on the differences between gcjwebplugin and icedteaplugin:
http://fitzsim.org/blog/?p=23
Both are currently included in IcedTea. And both are of course GPLed.

Here are the instructions on enabling it all inside IcedTea from when it
was merged from IcedTea 7 to IcedTea 6:
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/distro-pkg-dev/2008-July/002634.html

Cheers,

Mark