Changing the subject as the other thread is going in a different direction....
Dick Wall wrote: > In the discussion I did in fact call out that I am surprised that a > couple of years on from Java being open sourced, there are not more > Java desktop apps. The examples we gave show that Java can be used > successfully for writing desktop applications, but in the episode I > actually say that I am disappointed there are not more. That's a big > Well, you know I'm a write of a Java desktop application that is supposed to have some significance in Linux, once it gets to a stable and reasonably complete stage. The development has got some troubles in the past year - it went on, but my Hudson server exploded with the number of tests, with the result that I couldn't make the CI good practices to work for several months. So, I wasn't able to push official releases, as I couldn't run a full QA suite. Now that I am able to spawn Hudson slaves, I'm going to have all my projects back to good CI - still need a few days to complete also some other transitions in the software factory. So, the main problem is related to specific issues from me. But the biggest QA problems I had - and that ultimately led to an explosion of the number of tests - is specifically Linux. blueMarine tends to run well in Linux Ubuntu with the Sun Java machine. At this month of the past year I was naive enough to believe that to have it running on OpenJDK would have been a breeze. Indeed it wasn't, as the two things are different enough to require extensive testing for both (and also cosinder that the imaging in Java is one of the things where WORA is mostly broken). But this is not yet the problem - after all I could quality blueMarine on Linux only with the OpenJDK. The problem is that the OpenJDK is furthermore different in Fedora and other distros. What at October of the past year used to work with Linux + OpenJDK didn't with Fedora. I had to set up another test environment for Fedora, but this led me to the impossibility of running QA tests with the necessary frequency on all systems - I can have multiple distros in my lab at home, but not when I'm travelling for my business; and I can't have the things running on my laptop with in a virtualised environment because they take several hours and would prevent me from working on other things. There's also some poor management from me, because I promised to my beta testers that the next release would run flawlessly at least on Ubuntu + Fedora, while I could have been more prudent on my promises. This is basically preventing the next release of blueMarine from coming out and the only solution I see is to use Amazon EC2 or Sun Cloud for running in virtual boxes in the cloud (*). Unfortunately, I'm not able yet to handle EC2 (still studying it) and Sun Cloud, which on the paper should be simpler to use, doesn't exist yet. I reckon that my case is unfortunate, as when you deal with imaging tests are much heavier than the average - however, my current position is that most of (honestly, not all) my troubles for releasing a desktop app to Linux is due to Linux, specifically the fact that OpenJDKsuffers from the usual suicide attitude of the Linux world to fragmentate. (*) Hoping that won't cost me a fortune, which is one of my fears... -- Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere." weblogs.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/blog [email protected] - mobile: +39 348.150.6941 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
