IBM Project Harmony? on Dion Almaer's Blog

May 12

IBM Project Harmony?

So, the Project Harmony effort has a lot of supporters.

Interestingly, it seems like it was lead by good ‘ole Geir Magnusson.

Maybe nothing was read into that when the proposal came out. But now, Geir is an IBMer.

The whole Project Harmony could take on a new level of importance. I think a lot of sentiment out there was:

We have seen the troubles of having an opensource JVM/libraries a la GNU Classpath and co. Do they really think they can pull it off?

Maybe they can with the IBM VM team (as well as with help from other folks).

Imagine this world….

Apache has a leading opensource JVM
Developers start to go to use that JVM rather than going to java.sun.com
IBM has another level of control over Java, making Sun more and more of a fringe player
BEA JRockit folks join in, offering their own JIT and tools that work in this world

It is a very ambitious project, but there is a lot to be gained. Who has their hand up for writing the Swing implementation :/

Stallman is also at it again, talking about OpenOffice.org’s use of Java, and his rampage for a free Java.

IBM developerWorks has an interview with Jeremy Boynes, CTO of Gluecode where he talks about “Building a better J2EE server, the open source way”.