To hell with the JDK really!

First of all a big
congratulations to the Apache team for dreaming up the one of the
most fantastic pieces of cinematic ideas ever imagined.

The Apache team is
going on a journey
?Where no one has ever gone before? and aims to create a

?Compatible, independent implementation of J2SE 5 under the
Apache License v2?.

** Be part of the Best Java Blogger 2 Contest (May 2005) **

WOW! This is George
Lucas and Gene
Roddenberry rolled into one huge block buster. I
can’t wait for Christmas or Durga
Pujo for that matter.

It
is not that people have not tried to re invent the JVM/JDK wheel. The
open source landscape is strewn with failures such as GCJ and
Classpath, which are currently being used by all but a large group of
3 students in the University of Timbuktu!

How many more
commercially irrelevant JVMs do you want?

IMO it will be
almost impossible to re create or
re write a vast and quite complicated API like Java. You see the JDK
is just not java.util.* and java.lang.*, but contains a whole lot of
stuff like Swing, AWT, Naming, Java 2D, JDBC and of course a state of
the art Garbage Collection mechanism in it’s JVM.

I suggest an
alternate to the Apache team.

1. Do
   not re-write the entire JDK. If you want, you could for instance
   just re-write the java.io.* package, bundle it in a jar archive and
   let people drop this into their lib/endorsed directory. This would
   ensure that users get a better implementation if IO, but do not have
   to deal with a crappy implementation of Swing. All JVMs support this
   modular architecture as of today, where by if I wanted to replace a
   JVM supplied class with my own implementation
   (same package name), I can just drop into an endorsed directory and
   JVM class loaders would pick this up.

2. Give users the
   option of native compilation instead of the currently prevailing
   Just In Time native compilation, if that is what they require. The
   Excelisor
   JET JVM with its Ahead of Time compilation
   could be a good guide towards that end.

In
fact, I were running the Apache Foundation today, I would rather have
the best people within the group build the next generation Rich
Internet Web Application architecture
and a new Apache Web Server to support this architecture. In other
words do exactly what Microsoft is doing Smart Clients and
Macromedia(Oops Adomedia) is doing with Flex. To hell with the JDK
really!