Integrating Kaffe and Mozilla ?

[Tim Wilkinson]

As far as I'm aware there are a number of problems in doing this right now,
the major one being that the current release of Mozilla doesn't have the
much talked about OpenVM interface (or did they change that already?).

Anyway, from what little I know there are two issues in getting Kaffe into
Mozilla:

1. Interfacing the thread and memory management models.  Mozilla has (or
will have?) a well defined interface to a non-portable OS abstraction layer
and Kaffe needs to be targeted at this too.  This is alot easier from
0.10.x onward because of the various thread/gc/os interfaces that have been
added.  It should be a matter or writing the necessary interface glue to
plug these in.

2. Pluging the AWT into Mozilla.  No my area I'm afraid (Peter Mehlitz
could probably talk about this) but I suspect it's not trivial.  The three
options here are (1) interface Sun's AWT to Mozilla, which I think it kinda
pointless since you can't really use Sun's classes with Kaffe (legally that
is); (2) interface Kore's BISS-AWT intergration, perhaps a better
possiblity; or (3) interface to Transvirtual's Core-AWT (okay it's not
actually available yet but it's not too far away) which has been designed
to make this kind of porting much easier.

But aside from the technial issues, I think there might be some legal ones
- you can't embedded GPL code in to Mozilla since this introduces a
licensing conflict.  There may be some ways around this (I can think of
some rather hacky technical solutions to keep the two seperate) but for the
moment I think both Kaffe and Japher [pause while he check there site -
yup] suffer from this problem.

But on the techical front it'd be a great project, but I'd wait until the
OpenVM spec is published and Mozilla is released which supports it - and
maybe by then we'll have kaffe 1.0.0 out which would make a better starting
point too.

Cheers
Tim


Daniel Veillard wrote:

>   I was just reading the JVM page on Mozilla website:
>
> http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/jvm.html
>
>   It explicitely quote kaffe as being the current best starting point
> for developping a new JVM engine for Mozilla. I'm currently on the road
> and don't really have the time nor the environment to start hacking
> mozilla to plug kaffe in. Is there any people on this list who actually
> tried doing this sort of things ? I guess it would definitely make
> a lot of sense but this doesn't seem to be a small project.
>   Any ideas ? Any takers ?
>
>   Daniel
>
> --
> Daniel.Veillard at w3.org | W3C  MIT/LCS  NE43-344  | Today's Bookmarks :
> Tel : +1 617 253 5884  | 545 Technology Square   | Linux, WWW, rpm2html,
> Fax : +1 617 258 5999  | Cambridge, MA 02139 USA | badminton, Kaffe,
> http://www.w3.org/People/W3Cpeople.html#Veillard | HTTP-NG and Amaya.



--
  Tim Wilkinson                         Tel:     +1 510 704 1660
  Transvirtual Technologies, Inc.,      Fax:     +1 510 704 1893
  Berkeley, CA, USA.                    Email:   tim at transvirtual.com