Jalimo progress - piecing together the gems
Jalimo is coming along very nicely. Some weeks ago we got SWT to build fine inside OpenEmbedded and Scratchbox. First it worked at all:
Then we added support for those special hildon menus on the Maemo platform:
With the new N810 devices the keyboard shortcuts should actually be usable. :-)
Invisible and not possible to show on screenshots is the good amount of work that went into the infrastructure: Finally this week I managed to write some OpenEmbedded package recipes which make the Java Toolchain selfhosting. It still needs an initial Java 1.4 capable runtime and compiler but only to compile ECJ, then Classpath (already using the just built ECJ) and finally the Cacao runtime. After that this triplet is used for every other Java package. It is not only those 3 projects which I have to thank, but also the Debian Java maintainers because I heavily reused the ideas of their source packages to write the build recipes. :-)
With this in place the goal of pushing many of our recipes upstream to OpenEmbedded comes much closer. Still there are many things to do to make Java development really shine in OE like Ant integration or - my very special wish - GCJ Ahead Of Time compilation. I hope that with the groundwork done more people will enter the scene and bring more features and possibilities: IcedTea and PhoneME come to my mind ...
While I was fleshing out the build system bits, Sebastian worked on the new Jalimo Wiki, tested my recipes and wrote and documented some Jalimo example applications which should help new Jalimo users and developers to get into the game.
Here is the SWT example from Jalimo in action on both platforms:
The app is built using Maven2 which is very common in the Java scene. So with Jalimo on the device it will become pretty easy to run custom Java applications on them. Even proper packaging is possible through a Maven plugin I wrote some time ago and which is now published (under the GPL) and is extended by other people.
I made many more screenshots but did not want to put them all into the article.
If you wonder where the base of all this stuff is or in other words "Show me the code!". Well, have a look at our SVN repository then, check it out and contribute. :-D
Certainly there a still rough edges in Jalimo and there is a lot to do but if I compare that to the time when we started this at tarent out of nothing (from an integration point of view, of course) and only with the goal in mind, we have achieved quite alot. Today we can built the basic infrastructure for many of OpenEmbedded supported devices and the Maemo 4.0 or "Chinook" platform and provide a ground for custom applications or the base to port existing ones.
All I can say is that I really enjoy this deep diving in the free software universe and that I am very happy about all those gems that we can pick up and integrate and am grateful to those who made them.
With some luck Sebastian or I will present Jalimo at FOSDEM'08 Free Java Devjam. I am looking forward to see you all there!
