ask | dr. root

Earlier this week, when Sun announced it was releasing its implementations of Java technology as free software under the GNU General Public License version two, I thought about the existing five million Java developers who have been using the Technology for the past 11 years and made it a success. Thanks to them, Java is EVERYWHERE. Consider this, Java is used in:

• 800 Million Desktops
• 1.5 Billion Mobile Phones
• 1.65 Billion Smart Cards
• 6 Million Set-Top Boxes
• 180 Telecom Providers
• And somewhere on Mars...

More applications and devices use Java today than the total number of devices running Windows, Linux and Solaris -- COMBINED. Now that's what I call impressive...

And with Sun's annoucement of open sourcing Java, developers around the world are now given the opportunity to take the technology to new horizons.

So what is Sun releasing exactly?

Available immediately are the first pieces of source code for Sun's implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) and a buildable implementation of the Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME). In addition, Sun is adding the GPLv2 license to the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), which has been available for over a year through Project GlassFish.

There are three communities you can join if you're interested to learn more and if you would like to start downloading the available source codes:

Java SE -- OpenJDK Community:

From the OpenJDK website, you can get two significant components of the JDK:

• The HotSpot Virtual Machine
  
• And the Java programming-language compiler (javac) with complete NetBeans project metadata

Java ME -- Mobile & Embedded Community:

You can download the source code for Sun's feature phone Java ME implementation, which is the next-gen version of the platform that currently enables rich mobile data services in more than 1.5 billion handsets.

And you can also grab Sun's Java ME implementation for the emerging advanced phone segment, as well as the Java ME testing and compatibility kit framework -- the foundation for Sun's Java ME compatibility tests.

Sun is expected to release additional source code including the framework for the Java Device Test Suite later this year.

Java EE -- GlassFish Community:

GlassFish is the name for the open source development project for building a Java EE 5 application server. It's a robust, commercial, production quality, compatible application server that is free for development, deployment and redistribution.

The GlassFish development community is just getting started, but it has already over 100 contributors signed up. And the number of Sun and Oracle engineers working on this product is comparable in size to other application server developer communities today.

These are truly exciting times, don't you think?