Friday, February 08, 2008

A little less Harmony at JavaOne this year

"We regret to inform you that we will be unable to accept your proposal entitled ' Apache Harmony '."
Apache Harmony was established back in May 2005, and that year the JavaOne program committee graciously squeezed in a slot for Geir to explain the new "Sun-blessed-project".

Of course, things have changed a bit since then, with the establishment of Sun's own OpenJDK implementation project, and a certain amount of backpedaling on the JCK provision to Apache.

Over the last couple of years we have spoken at JavaOne about the contributions Apache received, and the advances in the project's capabilities. Last year we had a discussion of the project architecture and demoed some cool Swing based apps running quite happily on Apache Harmony. We are still making great progress with better than 99% Java SE API coverage, decent performance, and an innovative modular structure that allows Harmony code to be used in IBM Java 6.0, Google Android, and so on.

But it appears there is no longer any appetite for the Java community to hear about the rationale, progress, and achievements of an alternative implementation when attending SunJavaOne 2008 -- even though we've always played nicely <shrug/>.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tim, I wonder what was a reviewer argument for rejecting a proposal.

tim said...

maashaa,

The committee didn't give a reason.

I guess they found "Ten Ways to Destroy Your Community" a more compelling pitch for the Open Source Track?!

Unknown said...

Don't worry, you are a young project. It took GNU Classpath ten years to finally get a (shared) talk accepted last year (and no GNU Classpath talk this year either, although we do try to play nice with OpenJDK and IcedTea to get something going for CommunityOne). I don't think JavaOne is really the venue for a free software projects. Things like Fosdem and Fisl for example are much more rewarding venues to speak at because they are much more community oriented and less driven by the marketing of a few huge companies that only tend to gather to paid employees that get sponsored to go to promote their products. Although I had lots of fun at JavaOne last year I don't think it was super important from a community perspective. Hope to see you in Brussels soon.

tim said...

Hi Mark,

I'd love to come to Brussels, though the timing is hard this year as it is straight after our family holiday. Still trying to convince my wife and children that perhaps they would like a holiday abroad with beer and chocolate instead :-)

Anonymous said...

Hi Tim,
Folks at Intel had submitted a few talks and one of them was accepted. It is a session on "Transactional Memory in Java Systems".

In our abstract, we had included that we had developed our system on top of the Apache Harmony environment.

There were papers that had included Sun co-authors from Intel that were rejected. So I dont think they are targetting Harmony specifically.

Unfortunately the committee is not very transparent like a technical conference in detailing the reasons for the rejects.

Did the Harmony folks submit any BOF's. I think that would have been a good idea.

tim said...

suresh,

Glad to hear your talk was successful. I agree it would be good to have greater visibility into the selection process - or at least some constructive feedback. I realize that there are many submissions to consider.

AFAIK there was no Harmony BOF proposal, but I fully expect there to be a HarmonyOne meeting off-site as ususal!

Anonymous said...

Suresh, how many minutes do you expect to talk about Harmony? You bring us more community members, will you?