Glen Mazza wrote:
Here's the team's comments so far on this topic:
On a somewhat related side note, most of those features asked for by the fop team from jdk 1.4 (logging, prefs, new util classes) exist in free runtimes (kaffe, gcj, sablevm, ...) already. The major blocker on running all of fop on free runtimes is the need to use non-distributable code like jimi for some features, and the state of java2d support on free runtimes (in the works, I plan to merge in agile2d into kaffe for a speedy opengl based java2d implementation, and there is work on a cairo/gtk+ based java2d implementation in GNU Classpath).
Given that the free runtimes are quite widely ported, to even rather obscure platforms (arm-acorn or superh-linux [1], anyone?), and are catching up quite quickly[2], I hope the issue of 'does a vendor support java 1.4 on some platform' is going to be moot in a year or two, since you may be able to simply use [3] gcj/gij/kaffe/sablevm on your platform of choice to satisfy your customer's needs.
cheers, dalibor topic
[1] Kaffe has more than 50 platforms in CVS and a few more to be merged in ;)
[2] http://www.kaffe.org/~robilad/loc.png ;)
[3] Depending on developers actively maintaining these runtimes there, of course ;)
