Community Innovators Challenge Proposals

[Bryan Varner]

Fellow Haiku port team members:

I sincerely apologize for taking so long in mentioning this. However, 
seeing as today is the deadline, I figured it would be prudent to begin 
drafting and submit a few proposals.

I will be submitting the following proposal. And individual who wishes 
to be included should speak up now. Please make sure you meet the 
criterion for eligibility, outlined here: 
http://openjdk.java.net/challenge/rules/

If you want you name on the proposal, I will need your name, email 
address, and a brief description of any qualifications or involvement 
with Java, OpenJDK, and Haiku.

Regards,
-Bryan

The current draft is below. Comments are certainly welcome!






PROPOSAL: Porting the HotSpot VM to Haiku x86

1.) Introduction
The OpenJDK porters group is sponsoring a project to port OpenJDK to
the Haiku Operating System. Obviously, to achieve our projects goals,
we must port the HotSpot VM to our platform. As this is a sizeable
amount of work for any team, we are proposing this project to help
provide additional incentive to our team members, and bolster the
fervor of development.

The goals of this project are to port the HotSpot Client and Server
Virtual Machines to Haiku for the x86 processor architecture.

This project proposal meets the following criterion for project types
as outlined by Offical Rules of the OpenJDK Community Innovators'
Challenge in section 3.F.
         1.) Develops and implements ... that extend the applicability
             or use of the JavaSE platform into new markets...

         3.) Ports the OpenJDK code base to a new and interesting OS
             and/or hardware architecture.

2.) Deliverables
This project will be considered complete with delivery of
         a) A working build system that others outside of the porting
            effort can easily duplicate. Artifacts may be generated
            from directly within Haiku OS using a native tool-chain, or
            cross-compiled from a host OS.
         b) All source modifications published to the OpenJDK
            Haiku Port project.
         c) Resulting artifacts including both client and server
            versions of the HotSpot VM. JIT will be enabled, and
            execution of the 'java -version' command will result in
            expected (no exceptions, no errors) behavior.

3.) Milestones
To acheive these goals, the following basic porting tasks will need to
be accomplished.
         a) Creating a sane build environment suitable for compiling
            OpenJDK for Haiku x86.
         b) Builiding out the initial project structure.
         c) Creation of Haiku specific code.
         d) Native implementations for many core JavaSE classes.
         e) Initialization of the "Universe".

3.) Dependencies on Sun
There are no dependencies on Sun regarding the porting of OpenJDK to
the Haiku OS.


4.) Relevance to the Community
Haiku is an emerging, moderm Operating System targeted specifically
for desktop computing. It's unique approach to system design, which
impacts application scalability, threading performance, and it's tight
focus on desktop computing gives it a promising future in a world that
is increasingly using SMP to acheive better performance.

Having OpenJDK and more specifically the HotSpot VM ported to Haiku
will provide an attractive alternative environment for Java developers
to work in and target, as well as place OpenJDK one step closer to
acheiving the goal of platform ubiquity.