Older blog entries for db (starting at number 3)

I just created a new project entry for the GNU Classpath Extensions, supporting Free Java interfaces and implementations of javax.* packages. The JAXP software there is nearly ready for a release, one of these days I hope to put together a source distribution and binary release.

As of GCC 3.0, the GCJ support is beginning to get interesting enough to start thinking of large systems of GPL'd (or LGPL'd) Free Java, although it's not quite up to the everything that, say, JDK 1.1 is ... there are hard problems, and Sun's business strategies are no help.

I've recently been importing some of my XML utilities to the JAXP subproject of the GNU ClasspathX project ... good excuse to clean up some things, catch up to some of the updates in the various XML specs, catch up on bugfixing, and so on. License is "GPL with Library Exception".

So this means that Ælfred2 now has JAXP 1.1 support; I confess to being a bit underwhelmed by JAXP, though glad that at last Sun has at last accepted SAX2 (and JDK 1.4 will bundle it). The "gnujaxp.jar" file builds fine out of CVS, and has decent (and conformant!) DOM and SAX support.

The interesting bits are of course the XML Pipeline framework, which I'm cleaning up as I integrate/update it. That's a way to assemble and compose reusable SAX2 processing components ... for example, there's a streaming validator there, and producers of SAX2 events can assemble pipelines that terminate in DOM trees or just write straight XML text.

Most of this works well with GCJ (in GCC 3.0), but there are a few strangenesses. The DOM code doesn't compile yet with GCJ due to an inner class bug, and the exception handling runtime (and likely compiler) has some hard-to-isolate bugs. Oh well; I'm happy that Free Java has a decent compiler now, even if it's not yet ready for mission quality software!

Thanks to kroah for setting up the linux-hotplug project and mailing list. I just put some stuff onto the homepage, since otherwise it's a bit painful to find; and sent out a list query for help generating some integrated docs for all the hotpluggable drivers on Linux. (XSLT/Docbook is my preferred solution; it's not exactly the kind of problem the kernel docs are set up to address.)

This promises to be an interesting project, although it's inherently a complex architectural problem of the type I'm not sure I know Linux has addressed before. If you want most devices to autoconfigure when you connect them to Linux, that can mean changes all over the place. Right now it's been seen to behave pretty well for USB, PCI, and networking, but it's a bit thin on integration testing and on system docs.

OK, I finally signed up here at Advogato! Nice to be able to get a username I've kept for quite a few years now. Also, to start seeing how this certification system behaves.

I just created a project entry for one of my current Free Java projects: jPhoto, which among other things integrates Linux USB, Java, the GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ), and Kodak DC-4800 cameras into a nice SRPM.

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