Java (OpenJDK)

Update on Java port requires contacting one of the developers working on it. I think it stopped or stalled but can't say for sure. You need to email the programmer directly.

I think they added a newer ATI driver to Haiku for Radeon HD cards which may work for you.

Not many people use Java. I don't. Neither do the people I know. I imagine very few people use Java and only for a couple of programs. I believe it would bring very few end users to Haiku and don't believe worth the time or effort. Qt & SDL give Haiku lots of apps & games to play with.

For development to pick up in Haiku would require getting to R1 or late Beta sooner. That's when it'll catch the interest of more people and will be seen as more serious.

BeOS compatibility will be dropped in R3 (or even R2). Depends on the application situation. I think Haiku will have enough apps available that they could drop the compatibility in R2. Some want to drop it now but not likely to happen.

Maybe port the game to another language.

You can always switch to a browser based game that uses HTML + Javascript. I've played Ikariam from Gameforge on Haiku. Ikariam is little slow and best played when they first introduce new world. Gameforge has other games which may work with web browser but I haven't tested any of them. I think their other games will work too since Ikariam does but cannot say for sure.

http://us.gameforge.com/browser-games

Haiku is more for developers right now. For end users, Haiku is a 2nd or 3rd OS until it gets to late Beta or R1. Good for playing around with.

My personal opinion is that languages like Java,.net etc. they all just need to die and the sooner the better. Just like Flash must die.

Seriously thatguy, when someone asks about and is interested in OpenJDK it's not nice at all to spew out this kind of opinion. Encouragement and support would be much more welcome. Please try to respect and value others point of view.

Btw, I'd work on the java port if I had time and my todo-list wasn't very long already.

Whats wrong with c/c++ ? the java interpretters are written in c/c++. My biggest beef is the performance overhead of these languages. Java while better then .net still comes with a heavy performance penalty for anything that requires heavy lifting. Its works great for net applications however.

I remeber Java applets, they where horriable, I have used java applications, also horriable performance. Much like I have watched my machine overhead jump dramatically with alot of commercial apps that have moved to .net. Which is insane in reality. I know microcsofts motiviation is to drive the hardware market so they keep adding heavy features to push the upgrade cycle, anyone who denys this is crazy. Java just never really took off but for similar reasons. Its been great on the web though with its run anywhere type capability and html5 embraces javascript with the canvas functions.

Java was a technology looking for a application. At this point mono and .net are taking its place.The only people using it are server operators becuase it offers a short development cycle. Performance isn't much of a concern with the compute power these clusters have.

Are there any apps that even run java as a language anymore in a desktop enviroment ? I know theres a bunch of server side stuff.

whats the benefit to haiku as a desktop system to have jdk ? Is the juice worth the squeeze ?

The problem with C/C++ is they are not "safe" languages: that is for their low level nature you can referring pointer to not reachable memory (and it horribly crashes), bound of array is not checked (and it crash again or worst: undefined behavior), the lack of a real string type (at least in C, I'm not sure the string type is part of the official C++ standard), the GNU C API is error prone (in a lot of functions if you pass a NULL pointer it crash but man says it must set simply errno to EINVAL!)in all this case JAVA returns and exception (C++ maybe but can disabled... BeOS/Haiku seems not to use it, for example) stating clearly what error is... C/C++ crash and leave you alone with GDB :--)))

The other big problem is memory leaks using malloc() o new y ou can fogot to use the free() or delete before exiting from the function... Java use the garbage collector: no memory is lost.

I don't remember JAVA Applets to be too slow... maybe they take more time to start (remember JAVA is in reality a "virtual" computer and must "boot" to start your application) but when started no differences at least if your JVM use jit compilation and not interpretation...

The real problem of JAVA was the anti-concurrency policy of Microsoft that literally hired all Java developers... .NET in in reality a simple clone, but extended (remember the MS motto? "Embrace, extend, extinguish) of Java... as anyone can notate from that time JAVA not evolved much... as .NET done!
The ridiculous thing is that .NET use a virtual machine for not apparent reason as it can works only on Windows (and Windows works only on X86!)... Mono it is not at the level of JAVA on Linux it can't simply run a Windows GUI .NET application... give errors and not else!

Java is used in mobile phones (Android is a Linux kernel, in top of it runs a JVM, all Application targeting Android are written in Java not C/C++), Interactive TV uses a Java dialect too (MHP), if you want to write a trigger in Oracle database you can use Java instead of the ugly PL/SQL...

As JAVA is in reality a computer there a bunch of language that run on it, JPithon, JRuby... C too (yes you can use pointers and crash the whole JVM in Java if you wish):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages

OpenOffice needs Java to be ported... simply for this Java is needed...
I think that more chooses of languages to use can encourage more developers to join haiku...

thatguy you are right but come off too strong saying "it should die." Some people get use out of Java but I think Java is unimportant to majority of end users.

1) Haiku's goal is for home user. How many of them use Java applications in Windows or Linux?
2) Java is slow (compared to C & even C++). Lacks performance. Its claim to fame is being portable but you still need the JVM.
http://www.cherrystonesoftware.com/doc/AlgorithmicPerformance.pdf
With Java, one identical statement can turn into 7 instructions versus 3 for C++. One reason why you lose speed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Java_and_C%2B%2B#Performance
3) People today use Java for online gaming mostly. Online games are either Java, Flash, Ajax or Windows client.
4) What are popular Java applications that end users will use? Please list them for us. I can only think of online games like the poster mentioned. ie, I used a Java bittorrent client in 1999 and it ran horrible (hogged CPU + RAM). I then switched to a C++ one and the difference was night & day. From that time on I avoided Java like the plague and only used it a couple times when I had no other choice.
5) OpenOffice still mostly works without Java.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Java_and_OpenOffice.org
6) Java should really only be used for applications were it makes sense (like online games). Otherwise better to use C or C++.
7) There's a reason why most OSes are developed in C or C++ language. ie, performance

I am wondering if there has been any talk of GCJ being ported to haiku? Since GCC4 work is already underway why not just port the GCJ frontend? it has support for about 90% of the the java api.

Also as far as all the java hate is concerned, Most of what you hate about java probably has nothing to do with the language itself, but the commercial implementations of it. Java isn't just applets and its unfair to compare it to flash. With java you can create lightweight daemons and command line utilities the same way you can in any other language.

I'd like to mention the availability of JamVM and GNU Classpath as a basic fallback for OpenJDK. It can run Jetty on Haiku for instance (but not Tomcat or GUI applications).

I'm anything but not a java fan. It's true that c++ is not as productive as c# for example, but that's not that much because of c++. You must notice that c++0x has also a lot of features that java also has. I think in most cases c++ is not that productive because we dont have a good IDE. If you take a look at the toolkit "ultimate++", you will notice that with few c++ lines of code you can creat also a lot of things just using c++.

What i like even more than c++ is "d programming language" (version 2.0) , it's like c++ a system language but it has a lot of nice features that make programming much easier and safer.
I read a good part of the book written by Andrei Alexandrescu related to D programming. And I really love it. Alexandrescu is a very famous c++ guru which is/was praised by big names from the c++ area, but he is now actively working on the development of D, because he has a clear vision that D has a great future.

It may be true that Java/c# could bring a lot of programs, but at the moment i dont remember one single program written in java/c# that i would love to have on haiku.

I would like to have Calibre, which is written mostly in python.

Long rant, but good rant.

I can't speak for the Haiku team, but it seems they're in the throes of getting out the MVP to rapidly iterate on the road to beta. I don't think anybody is saying Haiku needs to write parts of the core OS in [insert non-C language here], which is silly.

Language bindings and separate runtimes create a few more avenues for developing applications. Should somebody come along and write a better app with (well written) C, C++, Ada, Haskell or assembly, even better! Nonetheless, the main API is still C++, and unless somebody comes along and does a darn good port of the (terrrrrrible) Swing libraries for Java, or the GSoC language bindings port for Perl or Python pans out, the only way to make quality apps that take advantage of the Haiku frameworks and UI will continue to be C++. That won't change, unless the developers decide to go API wrapper-crazy. :)

Though this is an interesting discussion, it takes away from the focus of getting to R1. If the developer who started this topic wants to attempt to work on a port of OpenJDK, I don't see any reason to turn them down. Not because I want to see JVM or even the C# CLR on Haiku right now; if it's a project they'd personally love to work on, hack away!

However, Haiku's #1 priority right now is _shipping_, in a stable state. As fun as it is to talk about new features, if this isn't someone's labor of love that won't get in the way of R1, or a GSoC project, Alpha 3's on the horizon, and there's going to be a series of beta releases before Haiku's ready for everyday usage.

The best contribution any dev can make right now would be to make _sure_ Haiku's foundations are solid. Depending on how my work schedule looks after June, I'll see if I can knock off a few low hanging fruits and lend a hand.

Wholeheartedly agree. Let's get the stuff that BeOS was going to deliver done right. We're not in a race except to stay relevant. I'm not sure adding Java now will help the relevancy thing, except last I checked it was the most widely used programming language in the world : nothing to sneeze at.

Furthermore, as someone who has an interest in dynamic and functional languages, many of the more compelling implementations that develop rapidly are hosted in the JVM. While many folks here rightfully gripe at Java, the JVM is one of the most compelling places where new languages and features are going right now. The JVM is very, very fast, too. It can allocate memory about 10x faster than C/C++ can with new and delete. You could beat the JVM with your own implementation of memory management in C/C++, but right out of the gate the JVM can beat C++ on many fronts speedwise. It cannot, however, support the kind optimization you can do in C/C++, but getting there is another matter.

Java may be dead, but the JVM is here to stay. It might help Haiku to have a JVM.

I asked Andrew Bachman about the JDK port:

There are still some hangups to getting the first bootstrap build
going. It would be really helpful if someone could figure out the
issues between haiku and gcc such that gcc could be built with the
java support, so we could use it for bootstrapping.

Andrew

So the first hangup seems to be getting OpenJDK to correctly build on Haiku with GCC. But GCC is newer now, so would someone like to get it compiled?

Its a sucky platform :P while execution speed may be comparable for longer running programs java programs lack the responsivness and lightweightness due to the requirement of a usually heavy VM and especially heavy in the case of OpenJDK VM.

That aside who really cares as long as it says merely optional and I am sure it will. Java isn't so bad for some things I actually used it in a digital signal processing class recently oddly enough and it was much better than Matlab for our use case.

I will say one thing though Java is alot more fun if you have a decent autocompleting IDE...and if you are doing graphical programs a layout system like netbeans.