JDK version ?

[Jules Bean]

On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Brian Adkins wrote:

> Hello,
>   I've been all over the kaffe web site, but I can't seem to find what
> version of the JDK is currently supported.  Is it 1.1.7, 1.2 etc. ?

Basically it's 1.1.7.  Although quite a lot of the ground-work has been
put in for 1.2, I believe.

> 
> Also, can you give me a brief summary of the merits of kaffe over the
> Blackdown JDK for Linux, or the native FreeBSD JDK?

These are rather subjective.  IMO, the biggest single advantage is that
the whole project is open - the source is available, you can build and
distribute modified versions (under the terms of the GPL), the kaffe team
is here and personal, and respond sensibly, effectively and quickly to bug
reports (I have been in a dialog with one of kaffe's developer's for the
last 3 days about some bugs in serialisation, which he's fixed for me
now). 

It is also the case that kaffe is a high-performance virtual machine.  I
haven't personally run any benchmarks (don't have anything from Sun
installed here) but I've seen benchmarks in which kaffe does very well.

Kaffe's AWT is, IMO, a strong point too.  It doesn't use native widgets
(which you may find distasteful), but it's very fast, and it actually
performs according to spec, unlike most sun versions I've seen.

Jules

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