Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
Sun has long used it’s Technology Compatibility Kit (or TCK) as the benchmark for testing compliance against specification standards, for example testing that a vendors Java EE Application Server meets the specification requirements.
Since Java in now Open Sourced, Sun has made available the TCK for Java SE so that people working on building on top of the OpenJDK can check compatibility with the SE specification.
So you heard about JavaFX at JavaOne this year, now how can you get started with trying it out? java.sun.com have an introductory tutorial that walks through the syntax and writing some simple Hello World type applications. They even have a link to an app you can use to interactive enter JavaFX script and execute it as you go to see your results.
After spending a few hours downloading and installing all the prereqs on Windows XP (Cygwin, Visual Studio .NET 2003) to build the OpenJDK, I got to the point to discover that the OpenJDK will currently not build on Windows, because there are files missing in the binary ‘plug’.
The OpenJDK comes in a couple of different downloads, one of the files being the ‘binary plug’ – this contains platform specific binary code that is currently not available for licensing reasons to be part of the open source OpenJDK, and so is provided ‘as is’, as the original binary files that are shipped with current JDKs. Unfortunately, since there is no mention of this on the project website (the Windows binary plug download leads you to believe that it is complete and all you need to be able to build on Windows) until you get to this step in the build process, you find out that there is one file missing in the binary files, t2k.lib, and without this you cannot build on Windows.
This missing file is described in this bug logged on the Sun site.
Apparently you can build on other platforms, Linux, Mac OS X, so I’ll investigating the Linux build instead for the time being until this issue is resolved.
If you were unable to make it to JavaOne this year, news.com have a collection of photos from the event.
Also, slides from most of the technical sessions are now available in PDF form from the JavaOne site here.