Dr Harry Foxwell

Two technologies that have gained widespread interest and support in the past few years are Java and Linux. Until recently, however, the two were separate, although they share similar visions of open, ubiquitous computing. As interest in both Java and Linux solutions increases, developers are naturally looking to combine the two, and want to write applications in Java that run on Linux systems. But they need stable, fast and fully functional JVMs, especially for server solutions that require servlets and support for Java Server Pages. Several independent efforts to port JVMs to Linux are in progress, including those by IBM, Sun Microsystems, the Blackdown Java-Linux Porting Team headed by Steve Byrne and the Kaffe group headed by Tim Wilkinson. The IBM and Blackdown ports are based on code licensed from Sun, while Kaffe is a "cleanroom" implementation. Ports based ... (more)