Here’s a peak into the new project I am now working on at Red Hat. I am impressed with all the feedback we have received so far, but more is always welcome!

————

We’ve just launched the Errai community site.

We are launching this community site early in the process to spark interest and engage the open source community.

For one, because we believe in what were doing, and we feel that the project is now at a point where it’s time to branch out and join the greater OSS community and let our hard work finally see the light of day.

So, on behalf of the Errai Team, welcome!

* Taken from The Errai Blog

It’s about time I make a formal announcement.

I have worked on the Open Source Java team for almost 4.5 years now. I started in the midst of GNU Classpath development, the encouraging discussions to get Sun to open source Java, and helped create IcedTea. I picked up many skills, allies and new ideas, I have decided it is a time for a small change.

The core of my job consisted of doing releases, working with the community, integrating features, fixing bugs, mentoring- I got to the point where I saw the project progress through many milestones, and felt my part was done.

I have moved over to the JBoss team at Red Hat. Working on a few new technologies, and learning a lot of new things. I doubt I will ever be very far and I will remain quite active in the OpenJDK community; unfortunately, it will no longer be what I am paid to do.

That probably means no FOSDEM. Damn.

We are proud to announce the release of IcedTea6 6.

The IcedTea project provides a harness to build the source code from
OpenJDK7 using Free Software build tools. It also includes the only
Free Java plugin and Web Start implementation, and support for
additional architectures over and above x86, x86_64 and SPARC via the
Zero assembler port.

What’s New?
—————–
- Added java method tracing using systemtap version 0.9.9+.
- Security fixes for:
CVE-2009-2670 – OpenJDK Untrusted applet System properties access
CVE-2009-2671 CVE-2009-2672 – OpenJDK Proxy mechanism information leaks
CVE-2009-2673 – OpenJDK proxy mechanism allows non-authorized socket connections
CVE-2009-2674 – Java Web Start Buffer JPEG processing integer overflow
CVE-2009-2675 – Java Web Start Buffer unpack200 processing integer overflow
CVE-2009-2625 – OpenJDK XML parsing Denial-Of-Service
CVE-2009-2475 – OpenJDK information leaks in mutable variables
CVE-2009-2476 – OpenJDK OpenType checks can be bypassed
CVE-2009-2689 – OpenJDK JDK13Services grants unnecessary privileges
CVE-2009-2690 – OpenJDK private variable information disclosure
- FAST interpreter for ARM
- Timezone fix: http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=377
- Stackoverflow error fix:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=381
- Backport regression (NPE) fix for AccessControlContext fix
- Bump to hs14b16
- The plugin has been updated to improve stability and cookie support.
Support for certificates with mismatched CNs has been added as well.
—————–

The tarball and nosrc RPM can be downloaded here:

http://icedtea.classpath.org/download/fedora/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-28.b16.fc11.nosrc.rpm

http://icedtea.classpath.org/download/source/icedtea6-1.6.tar.gz

The following people helped with this release:
Gary Benson, Deepak Bhole, Andrew Haley, Andrew John Hughes, Mark
Wielaard, Lillian Angel, Matthias Klose, Ed Nevill, and many others.

We would also like to thank the bug reporters and testers!

To get started:
$ hg clone http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea6-1.6
$ cd icedtea6-1.6

Full build requirements and instructions are in INSTALL:
$ ./configure [--enable-visualvm --with-openjdk --enable-pulse-java
--enable-systemtap ...]
$ make

// Thank you especially to Andrew Haley for taking care of this release.

IcedTea6 1.5.1 security release.

IcedTea7 1.11 release (rpms available).

Congratulations to Andrew Haley and Martin Buchholz; the newest members of the OpenJDK Interim Governance Board. It is nice to see one of Red Hat’s own appointed. Andrew is Red Hat’s Open Source Java team lead, and I am very grateful to be under his guidance.

Mark Reinhold’s official announcement is here.

Following Andrew Hughes’ IcedTea7 1.10 release announcement, we have made Fedora RPMs and SRPMs available for experimental purposes. These are based on OpenJDK7’s JavaOne preview release.

We are proud to announce the release of IcedTea6 1.5.

The IcedTea6 project provides a harness to build the source code from OpenJDK6 using Free Software build tools.

What’s New?
—————–
- Static trace support through systemtap.
When given the configure option –enable-systemtap IcedTea will build
hotspot with the dtrace static markers enabled and install an hotspot
tapset that can be used to dynamically trace execution of java
applications at runtime. See the tapset/hotspot.stp file for
documentation of the various trace points and arguments available.
- Allow building of other virtual machines besides the default VM. Additional
virtual machines on architectures where hotspot is available are cacao
and zero (or shark), and cacao, where zero (or shark) is available. It’s
not possible to build cacao as the default VM, and zero as additional VM.
- Update to latest HotSpot minor build (hs14b10–>hs14b15) from the new
HotSpot Express repository.
- Updated to OpenJDK b16 build.
- VisualVM updated to 1.1.1.
- Updated to support CACAO 0.99.4.
- Several web browser plugin and javaws support fixes:
– Fixed security handling to prevent access denials when there is a site
specific exception in the policy file
– Allow extentions (chrome) to run Java code with full permissions
– Added non-trusted SSL support to WebStart (javaws)
– Added proxy support
– Other improvements that were breaking specific sites (tag parser fix,
nested jar support, etc.)
– Added JVM Console (used by http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/)
- Removed gcjwebplugin support.
- LCMS security fixes.
- Many build improvements.
- Many gervill, java2d, nio2, pulse java, zero/shark, jtreg fixes.
- Experimental out-of-the-box cross-compilation support (not yet finished)
- Other bug fixes.
—————–

The tarball and nosrc RPM can be downloaded here:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/download/fedora/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-21.b16.fc11.nosrc.rpm
http://icedtea.classpath.org/download/source/icedtea6-1.5.tar.gz

The following people helped with this release:
Gary Benson, Deepak Bhole, Andrew Haley, Andrew John Hughes, Tomas Hurka, Ioana Ivan, Mattias Klose, Omair Majid, Xerxes Rånby, Marc Schoenefeld, Robert Schuster, Mark Wielaard, Lillian Angel

We would also like to thank the bug reporters and testers!

To get started:
$ hg clone http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea6-1.5
$ cd icedtea6-1.5

Full build requirements and instructions are in INSTALL:
$ ./configure [--enable-visualvm --with-openjdk --enable-pulse-java --enable-systemtap ...]
$ make

The new package has been built into Fedora 10, Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 (rawhide) and should appear in the yum repositories in a couple of days.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about Daily Challenge. On April 4, they are planning to break a record right here in Toronto.

If you are in the downtown area, there is another worth while reason to stop in at Second Cup across from Much Music for a cup of java (coffee, of course).

The event is called “Pay it Backward”, where everyone in line buys a coffee for the person behind them. The record to break is 490 cups of coffee sold. With several sponsors including Sick Kids Hospital and Flow 93.5, the main cause is to encourage people to do good.

Add your name to the list via Facebook.

Never, in one day, have I spun (and respun) as many packages as I did today. It was as if every JDK known to mankind (err… Fedora & RHEL) needed to be updated today. Oh, I should mention that I am still not done.

Sorry for the delay…