Most popular applications?

[Jukka Santala]

On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Jim Pick wrote:
> I want to compile a list of what people feel are the most important Java
> applications that people will be using kaffe to run.

"Important" and "popular" leave bit unclear what is exactly meant, but
I'll add a few programs of interest anyway.

http://www.xsmiles.org - "prototype" XML browser with support for multiple
document types. Altough our embedded work mostly calls for framebuffer
support, I fixed the Kaffe desktop-edition to run this as well last year.
I don't know if it still does, since lot has changed. In particular, this
includes the following common/outside resources:
1) Comm API support (I don't think this actually works)
2) Apache XSL Formatting Objects Processor, Java 1.1 version
3) Ogg/Vorbis Java codec, this was added recently, probably doesn't work
4) RhinoScripter from Mozilla; the bytecode compiler seems to confuse even
Sun's GC
5) Skinlf Look & Feel skins.
6) SteadyState CSS2 parser
7) CSIRO SVG; I can unqualifiedly say this doesn't work, and I doubt
adding Java2D to Kaffe is going to happen in near future. I'm looking at
implementing Mobile SVG to run with Kaffe.
8) Tidy HTML pre-processor; we'll probably give this up later...
9) Apache Xerces+Xalan with sax, moving to version 2.0 probably
10) We're always looking forward to media support, which is a big thing
currently. I personally don't fancy JMF too much, since there still always
has to be native implementation of the codecs due to performance reasons,
and just the framework takes 2 megs while using Sun properietary classes
and requiring keeping up with the Sun version, but I'm sure a JMF subset
wouldn't hurt.

We're doing lot of research & development on these, and due to its
portability, API support and conformance Kaffe is presentlty our platform
of choice both on XML-devices and DigiTV branches. (At Helsinki Institute
for Information Technology / Helsinki University of Technology)

As stated earlier, for embedded devices we aren't really looking forward
into running Kaffe on top of huge, slow windowing systems, so the desktop
edition doesn't seem too appealing right now. Neither does signing bunch
of NDA's to use a properietary VM such as KaffePro for research purposes,
no offence meant :)

However, since so many research projects here rely on Kaffe w/framebuffer,
we've formed an improptu alliance between the major research projects to
look into improving the PocketLinux Kaffe implementation. Speaking purely
personally, I wouldn't mind seeing framebuffer GUI added to the desktop
edition, or the GPL released versions merged, and that's something we're
looking at.

In addition it was mentioned on GCJ list I believe that FreeNet runs on
Kaffe.

 -Jukka Santala