OpenJDK adoption by Java User Groups (original) (raw)

Rémi Forax forax at univ-mlv.fr
Fri Dec 9 02:23:34 PST 2011

On 12/09/2011 11:16 AM, Martijn Verburg wrote:

Martijn,

There were a number of surprises on Warnings Day last week. One was the amount of enthusiasm. Another was the difficulty of staying within the prescribed bounds, such as "no public API changes". Which brings me to a suggestion I've been meaning to make for a while, and is relevant here. For changes to the OpenJDK code itself, you can see the sort of controls we go through to make sure nothing bad happens. That can be somewhat limiting for folk who want more creative freedom ;-) One possibility is the development of tools which are not themselves part of the OpenJDK itself, but which are useful to folk working on OpenJDK. One such category of tools is intelligent comparison tools. Given two copies of a library (such as rt.jar and tools.jar), analyze them to report on differences. A bunch of different comparison tests could be done: -- have any public API signatures changed (where "public" means "documented/published") -- have any public API signatures changed (where "public" means the Java access modifier) -- if any signatures have changed, are the changes binary compatible, source compatible, etc. See [http://blogs.oracle.com/darcy/entry/kindsofcompatibility] -- have any method bodies changed -- and so on I wonder it would make sense for interested groups, such as JUGs, to team up and take on such projects. -- Jon We could certainly list projects like this on a Adopt OpenJDK site and work with the JUG leaders to put together teams. There's never any guarantee that a particular project will get picked up, but with such a diverse group of developers there would hopefully be some sort of adoption yes. To add further to this, please send myself or Mike Barker any ideas you'd like to see tackled and we'll get them added to the list. Cheers, Martijn

There is already something like this in the test of ASM (google ASM java). It allows us, developers of ASM to maintain 1.3 compatibility by checking against a public description of the 1.3 API.

Rémi

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