The Qt based AWT backend has been backported to work on Qt2. I've received a patch doing that, but unfortunately, it didn't really work. It was not so hard in the end to get it right. I just had to fight with my SuSE 7.3 installation that tried to compile against Qt1 and gloriously failed after the moc step. Is anyone still using Qt1 out there? I don't think it's worth backporting to Qt 1, really. Suporting Qt 2 has some justification, as Trolltech released a free as in beer version for free software developers for Win32. That could give kaffe another functioning AWT on win32, if the win32 native API based one is functioning at all. I can't say, as I still have to fix an ugly Cygwin bug.

I've updated the files comping from GNU libtool to libtool version 1.4.3. Why can't libtoolize just copy libtool.m4 along with the other files? Kaffe used to have the libtool macros in its acinclude.m4, so a simple libtoolize resulted in a setup that was very broken: new libtool files, old libtool.m4 autoconf macros, huge chaos. Only after deleting acinclude.m4 I was able to get a working setup again. Oh yes, and copying libtool.m4 from the source archive, as it was nowhere to be found in /usr/share/libtool .

More packages from GNU Classpath have found their way into kaffe's class library, mostly javax.* stuff. And this time around, I've also included the most of GNU jaxp, giving kaffe good XML support. Since today, kaffe comes with a built-in XML parser, Aelfred2, taken from GNU jaxp.

My URI patch made Saxon 7.3 work with kaffe. It will probably go into GNU Classpath, now that I've started the GNU paperwork voodoo with tromey. I went ahead and checked it into kaffe's CVS, as it will take some time for the paperwork to be done, I guess.

I've also tried to compile a few typical XML related packages beside Saxon 7.3. Ant 1.5.1 builds with some patching. The main problem is that the Ant developers have a hard reference to sun.something.Base64 in their code, a class that doesn't exist in kaffe, and probably never will. Luckily, ant comes with its own Base64 encoder, so with a little use of reflection this works out o.k. I'll submit a patch to the ant developers, hoping that this one gets accepted.

Latest releases of xp, xt, crimson, xalan, jdom, logkit and avalon all build nicely on kaffe now. Use -Dbuild.compiler=kjc to tell ant to use kjc as its compiler. One might need to add some jars to CLASSPATH if ant complains about not finding classes, but overall, it just builds. That's a big leap from about a year ago. I should benchmark kaffe using xsltmark again.

Among interesting things that don't build yet are xerces, fop and batik. So while I could generate html documentation for kaffe from a kaffe.xml DocBook document, due to fop 0.20.4 not working on kaffe yet, I can't get PDF docs. Is there a pure Java solution to generate man pages from DocBook? Or, in other words, are there XSL stylesheets that generate man pages from DocBook documents?

I've put MingW on the windows partition of my notebook. I'd like to give cccl wrapper for Microsoft Visual C++ a try. That would in theory enable me to build kaffe on win32 using automake and MingW instead of fiddling with MSVC++ project files. And last but not least, there is a port to MingW in the pocketlinux kaffe tree that could be merged in, while I'm on that platform.