[Gcjwebplugin-devel] Java on the 770 (who cares about licensing)

[Philippe Laporte]

Hi,
    I will be putting SableVM, Classpath, and Knopflerfish OSGI 
altogether on the 770.

I invite all the willing to help. I have not quite started yet. I am 
still gathering intelligence on how to best perform this task. I do not 
have unlimited resources.

I was the lead Designer of Browser Development and wrote a fair portion 
of the Browser UI for the 770 at Nokia. I designed the GTK+ Opera 
widget. I was formerly also at Transvirtual Technologies, the pioneers 
of Embedded Lunux and Java. I implemented a little-known analog (NIH 
syndrome) to Rhino called XS (XoeScript).

We at Gatespace Telematics are determined to offer the best possible 
open-source CDC-OSGI Java platform. We are beginning in the open-source 
Java world but are determined to bring in our resources to see this 
package grow and eventually be chosen by Nokia as THE Java platform for 
Maemo.

I foresee the need for MIDP so all efforts in that direction are great! 
We foresee a scheme where a midlet's byte-code would be downloaded to a 
device and precompiled to native at installation. GCJ is definitely a 
player here. Despite its seeming excessive long-term memory consumption, 
this scheme is already in deployment in the mobile industry. I think 
that SOOT will help in reducing the byte-code size (and thus save money 
for the user). Of course also to rename all identifiers to shorter 
strings with some other tool. And what else, then? I haven't looked into 
this very deeply at all. OMA standards are used to get the midlet onto 
the device.

We are behind the BSD-licensed Knopflerfish implementation and will be 
proud to demonstrate our leading product for Telematics using the 770.

Gatespace Telematics has at this point no contract with Nokia.

I would also like to invite all to take a look at Knopflerfish. The web 
site is bad, but it awaits a major revamp. Gatespace *used* to have 60 
employees.

There is a fair chance that we will also be completing the GCJ-Classpath 
webplugin, and thus have Applet support in Mozilla/Minimo. A 
prerequisite for that would be signed jars support in Classpath. We 
would do the rest.

Another thing we might do is add profile options to the Classpath build 
system if they don't exist yet.

I hope that many will find this interesting and want to join in some way.

Best Regards,

--
Philippe Laporte
Director of OMA and Embedded Development

Gatespace Telematics
Första Långgatan 18
41328 Göteborg
Sweden
Phone: +46 702 04 35 11
Fax:   +46 31 24 16 50
Email: address@hidden