I understand your skepticism, Preston. To be honest it is very common
to be skeptical about Harmony.
And I agree that Harmony can not guarantee yet the level of stability
of old-mature-well-known-everybody-using-and-so-on JREs and beat them
in every aspect of performance. That's true.
We got a usual circle here: not mature enough - do not have customers,
do not have customers - can not be mature enough.
But from other hand Harmony has good and continuous progress and it
can provide unique benefits to it's customers even now. Just few
things right out of my head:
1. Apache License. We are all the part of ASF and I believe that
nobody doubts that ALv2 is a benefit for customers :)
2. Modularity - you can remove modules which are unneeded for your
application and reduce the size of bundle. For example javax.swing is
huge package and it's almost always not needed for server side
applications. Or you can choose your favorite GC.
3. Multiple VMs
4. Open source - usual benefits of open source software. You can debug
your application better and so on.
5. Community support - required fixes, improvements and so on.
Speaking of Harmony stability... We have rather big list of
applications which are working with Harmony including Eclipse,
EIOffice, JIRA, jEdit and so on. I do not remember all the
applications tested on Harmony but you can find more detailed list on
Harmony wiki [1]. Tomcat was one of the first application we've
enabled on Harmony and it look pretty well on it.
Performance... We are working on it and Harmony shows comparable
results on number of benchmarks. Yes, some benchmarks shows
significantly lower performance but you can not create production
quality JRE in one day :)
So that was pragmatical, user caring things.
However we also have ASF related things... Since we are all in ASF...
I believe you all knows about the issues with getting J2SE TCK for
Harmony and Apache has hard talks on this. Wider adoption of Harmony
will give ASF additional arguments in this talks. And the result of
this talks is important for all Java related open source community.
And the last is community thing... Yes! We need support from our Big
ASF Brother! :)
Actually we do not need too much support. Bundle creation support,
link to the bundle from Tomcat site and some free-time testing/bug
filing/areas for improvement suggestion would be enough :)
Thanks in advance.
SY, Alexey
1. http://wiki.apache.org/harmony/Application_Status
Post by Preston L. BannisterPost by Henri GomezPost by Preston L. BannisterYes, any such bundle should be under Harmony, not Tomcat.
Why not Tomcat ?
If you are looking at Harmony, you are (or should be) expecting something
experimental.
Post by Henri GomezSpeaking as an application developer, the (outside?) chance that a customer
Post by Preston L. Bannistercould go to download Tomcat, and end up with Harmony - this does not
make me
Post by Preston L. Bannisterhappy. At least until I have a *lot* more confidence in Harmony.
Tomcat is
Post by Preston L. Bannisterexpected to be mature and reliable.
If you're confident in Tomcat ,so a 'bundled' Harmoy/Tomcat will help
Harmony team fix failures in the Java Runtime you could detect.
Sadly, I have no interest in testing Harmony. Thanks for the offer, but my
plate is already far too full. Nor am I interested in my customers testing
Harmony, for pretty much the same reason.
Pragmatically, as a web application developer, the Sun JVM is free for my
customers, which eliminates any interest (aside from theoretical) in
non-Sun, maybe-sorta-kinda-mostly working, and non-performant JVMs. Sun is
doing a good job, looks to continue to do so, and seems generally to have a
clue about not screwing customers. Good enough.
Flip this around - who *does* have a pragmatic interest in testing and
development of an open-source JVM? That should suggest a venue.