This is already a bit of old news, as jpick and me pushed the release out last week, before I headed off to Brasilia for CafeBrasil to talk continuously for a week or so about Kaffe OpenVM, GNU Classpath, GNU gcj and all that. 1.1.5 is notable for being the 'Duke Nukem' of Kaffe releases, the one that was 'coming soon' for a loong while, and finally made it into a nice, big, fat release.

In the year since Kaffe 1.1.4 was released, the lines of code count more than doubled, with around one million new lines of good source code from the various upstream projects, like GNU Classpath, GNU JAXP, GNU Crypto, and gcj The merge with GNU Classpath is now almost finished, with around 20 files left over to switch. That means we're almost 99% there, finally. It's been a long ride, and now we have a new shiny AWT implementation based on gtk, and the GNU Classpath 'good-looking' Swing working out-of-the-box in kaffe, just like all the various integrated upstream projects, like Tritonus for sound support, GNU Crypto for JCE, Jessie for JSSE, GNU inetlib for URL handlers, etc.

My plan for the future (i.e. this year ;) is to turn Kaffe from a melting pot and integration hotbed of class library development into the same 'bleeding edge' intergration facility for virtual machine components. Some work on that has begun on Kaffe's core, and ultimately the idea is to be able to plug in parts of other excellent runtimes, like gcj, or JamVM into Kaffe and vice versa. If it works out, it will turn into a GNU Classpath VM framework, that would allow people to bootstrap their VM from state-of-the-art spare parts.

Of course, now that I've spent more than a week away from CVS, I've seen that those amazing Classpath hackers have pushed further ahead and added a lot of new exciting code, like a unified IO encoder/decoder framework, and progress on CORBA and Swing. It's great to come back and see a huge lump of nice code sitting in the CVS ready for merging. Thanks a lot to everyone hacking on Kaffe and GNU Classpath, you folks seriously rock.

Assimilating NetBeans from Within

Continuing on the path to world domination for GNU Classpath using runtimes, the necesaary steps have been made to make Kaffe's CVS head work within NetBeans 4. It turned out that I just had to make Kaffe output -version information in a suitably JDK-ish way for NetBeans to be able to parse it.

While still only running on non-free software, it works suprisingly well as a way to use Kaffe to build and run Java programs that will work on free software. In all its glory it looks like this.

This is the first step towards getting NetBeans to run on a fully free software stack and smashing yet another Java trap. Thanks to Tim Boudreau, the NetBeans lead for talking me into playing with it. I hope some NetBeans hacker takes it up from here, and makes it possible to build, run and distribute NetBeans on a fully free stack.