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<subject "GNU Classpath and friends @ Fosdem 2006">

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<h2>GNU Classpath and friends meeting during Fosdem 2006</h2>

<i>Fosdem, Saturday/Sunday 25/26 February 2006, Brussels, Belgium</i>
<p>
The various free software library, runtimes, compiler and tool
projects around GNU Classpath will meet in Brussel to discuss what has
happened in the last year in the Free Software community and what the
next year will bring us during Fosdem.
<p>
The 6th edition of FOSDEM (Free and Opensource Software Developers'
European Meeting) will take place on February 25+26 2006 in Brussels
(Belgium), at the Solbosch Campus of the ULB (Free University of
Brussels). FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event for the community
and organized by the community.
See <a href="http://www.fosdem.org/">http://www.fosdem.org/</a>.
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  <h3>Saturday from 13:00 to 17:00 - "End-User talks"</h3>

  <p>
    Presentations that show what cool stuff can be done with the Free
    Stack right now.
  </p>

    <p>
    <b>Putting the 'Free' into JFreeChart</b>
    <i>Dave Gilbert, JFreeChart Project Leader</i>
      <p>
	A review of the efforts to make JFreeChart work with GNU
	Classpath-based runtimes, including a brief history, a demonstration
	of the current state (using the java bindings for Cairo), and an
	overview of the work that remains to be done.
      </p>
    </p>

    <p>
    <b>Using Eclipse for GNU Classpath development</b>
    <i>Tom Tromey</i>
      <p>
	Learn how to setup a fully working development environment based
	on GNU Classpath in Eclipse that can be used to bootstrap the full
	free toolchain (and can be used to run Eclipse itself) in just 10
	minutes.
      </p>
    </p>

    <p>
    <b>Eclipse RCP and GCJ/GIJ</b>
    <i>Wayne Beaton</i>
      <p>
	Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) is a runtime platform for
	delivering your Java applications on multiple platforms. RCP is far
	more than just a windowing toolkit; it is rich client "middleware"
	that provides a comprehensive framework for building and deploying
	applications that are modular, extensible, and updatable. The kinds
	of applications you can build with Eclipse RCP are limited only by
	your imagination. During this talk, we will discuss how the Eclipse
	RCP can be used in conjunction with the Eclipse Eco-system and
	GCJ/GIJ to build high quality applications.
      </p>
    </p>

<p>
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  <h3>Sunday from 09:00 to 13:00 - "Developer talks"</h3>

  <p>
    Presentations of (core) libraries and runtimes that are in progress,
    made a lot of progress in the last year and are in active development.
  </p>

    <p>
    <b>Free Swing, past, present and future</b>
    <i>Roman Kennke</i>
      <p>
	An overview of that state of Free Swing one year ago, what has been
	done in the meantime, what still must be done and which applications
	work now.
      </p>
    </p>

    <p>
    <b>The Free CORBA comes</b>
    <i>Dr Audrius Meskauskas</i>
      <p>
    If the Free world does not want to step back in the battle, we need
    a complete set of the Free tools for advanced communication over
    the network. For our CORBA implementation we needed:
    <p>
    <ol>
    <li> Free. No classes with restricted license.
    <li> Fully workable, interoperable and pass tests, recognized by
       the CORBA user community as serious (we needed to find a well
       known Free testing suite).
    <li> Properly commented, being ready for the long life in the Free
       world.
    <li> No pressure to use the outdated approaches.
       CORBA 3.0.3 and jdk 1.5.
    </ol>
    <p>
    To reach these goals, we have chosen for implementing a clean room
    implementation, using the published standard specifications only.
    During the recent year of the GNU Classpath development, this goal
    is in large degree achieved. The important directions of future
    development could be providing features that are outside the scope
    of the both CORBA standard and Sun API, but included in the near all
    proprietary implementations (SSH, HTTP and other bridges, get rid of
    rmic code generator for RMI/IIOP, fault tolerant behavior, reduced
    the footprint and others).
      </p>
    </p>

    <p>
      <b>The JamVM runtime</b>
      <i>Robert Lougher</i>
      <p>
	An overview of the JamVM virtual machine, with comparisons to other
	GNU Classpath runtimes, and a section on the VM interface.
      </p>
    </p>

    <p>
    <b>Integrating Vmgen-based interpreters</b>
    <i>Christian Thalinger</i>
      <p>
	Vmgen is a tool for writing efficient interpreters. The Cacao
	runtime recently added a Vmgen based interpreter in addition to
	the JIT engine.
      </p>
    </p>

<p>
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  <h3>Sunday from 14:00 to 17:30 - "The Future"</h3>

   <p>
     Interactive technical hacker discussions on how to integrate
     the projects more and move forward in the next year.
   </p>

    <p>
    <b>State of the world, beyond japi</b>
    <i>Mark Wielaard, GNU Classpath Maintainer</i>
      <p>
	After a short overview of the various free stacks, libraries,
	compilers, tools and runtimes this session is mostly open discussion
	about what work remains to be done and how to integrate the various
	efforts better. Ideas for work items welcome.
      </p>
    </p>

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<b>Additional Resources:</b>
<ul>
<li><createlink name="Free But Shackled - The Java Trap"
	url="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html">
	(by Richard Stallman)
</li>
<li><createlink name="Escaping the Java Trap: A practical road map to the Free Software and Open Source alternatives"
	url="http://developer.classpath.org/support/">
</li>
</ul>
<p>
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<b>Official links:</b>
<ul>
<li><createlink name="FOSDEM Homepage"
	url="http://www.fosdem.org/">
</li>
</ul>
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