Java

After much anticipation, the free-as-in-freedom version of Sun's Java JDK has arrived in Debian's `main' section. There are still a few bugs in the packaging, but these will be ironed out before the lenny release. Various other useful packages still need to adapt to its presence, but many will be able to move from the `contrib' section into `main' as well. Going forward, this makes Sun's Java platform quite attractive for developing future free software applications. There is a reasonably performant implementation now available in most distributions, that will receive security updates, has a good team of developers behind it, and already has a large community of people with skills in the language. If static versus dynamic typing becomes an issue, Jython might offer a nice competing implementation of Python. We might one day get to see what this `Groovy' thing is all about. In terms of GUI applications, Andrew Cowie's new java-gnome 4.x bindings will allow truly native integration with the rest of GNOME - or stick with plain Swing for cross-platform portability. ...

Late on Tuesday evening, I successfully got a branch of Choob to run without its 'Object DB'. Presently, it runs only a few of the more simple plugins - for instance, the 'Alias' plugin is not supported, so I spent a couple of minutes trying to work out why it wasn't replying to commands. With ODB gone, vast swathes of complicated parsing code can be removed from the bot's core. JJTree should no longer be needed to compile the bot. The next step is probably to consolidate the core database code using Hibernate, and then get the more complicated plugins to work again. ...