I while ago it was mentioned that Jikes + Japhar + Classpath would
be the beginning of a complete open-source Java solution by Alex
Nicolaou. Unfortunately, a lot of tools are still missing that are part
of the standard Java 1.1 and 1.2 distributions. Since the goal of
Classpath is to provide a free open source Java library implementation,
I think that classpath should provide these tools also or point the user
to viable alternatives like Jikes. Most of these programs are really
just wrapper versions to java classes that automatically load the VM and
those wrappers will be VM/OS dependent but the backbones are still
written in Java.
Java 1.1 Tools
javac - jikes is faster
java - VM/OS specific
jre - VM/OS specific
jdb - important
Java 1.1 jdb uses the sun.tools.debug package
<http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.0.2/api/Package-sun.tools.debug.html>
Java 1.2 jdb - uses JVMDI in sun.tools.debug and jdb
- forthcoming Java Debugger(JBug) is promising
<http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/earlyAccess/jbug/doc/index.html>
uses JVMDI at VM/OS level
uses JDWP (interface between VM and debugger api)
uses JDI (interface for a debugger to use)
- note: JVMDI is in the current JDK 1.2 and JDWP and JDI will
soon be
javah - needed
javap - needed
javadoc - Aaron M. Renn wrote some stuff
appletviewer - being taken care of
rmic, rmiregistry - part of RMI stuff - being taken care of by author of
Ninja-RMI
serialver - I thought I saw it in the web CVS which has now disappeared?
native2ascii - needed
jar - desperately needed
javakey - part of Sun security provider, I don't know status
Additonal tools in JDK 1.2
extcheck - checks for jar conflicts - needed
rmid - RMI tool - I guess will be written by Ninja RMI author
keytool - replaces obseleted javakey - ?
jarsigner, policytool - security tools - ?
tnameserv, idltojava - corba specific - needed for java CORBA support
along with an ORB
Mark Benvenuto
