About a year ago, August 2002, Innotek and Golden Code Development (http://www.goldencode.com/) announced separate projects to port J2SE(TM) 1.4.1 to OS/2.
Today both companies have reached major goals in their approaches, Innotek established ODIN as the
platform they want to use. Is important to note that the first release of the Innotek approach was composed by OS/2-eCS binaries
but today we have an "add-on" for ODIN to use the Windows version inside OS/2. At this moment I want to point out that ODIN doesn't emulate
Windows programs, but converts Win executables to Warp executables.
The approach taken by Golden Code Development was to make a Warp port of the J2SE(TM) 1.4.1 using pure
Warp APIs and looking forward to the Sun certification for their products.
Some of the major goals of Golden Code Development are speed, proven compatibility (Sun Certification) and stability.
Beta 2
About 2 weeks ago we received the Beta 2 of the Golden Code Development 1.4.1 J2SE. Surprise! It works,
and actually did well compared with the IBM Java 1.3.1 JVM. The installation was straightforward but outdated.
Since this is a beta the package was on .ZIP files and the only things I had to do was to unzip them.
I also had to point the PATH to the D:\java141 directory, and modify the JAVA_HOME
variable used by some programs like Tomcat (http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/), but not
for the J2SE and that was it, I am sure that sometime in the future they will put a nice installer on it, or
maybe they will use a .WPI WarpIn package (and I know lot of wpi programmers may want to help to get it done).
After the installation I didn't want to test the examples provided by Sun, and Golden Code
Development; I wanted "real" tests, so instead I used my Art of Illusion (http://www.artofillusion.org) and it did
great with the creation of new files and the load (and saving) of some already created files I had. After that I continued
with JEdit (http://www.jedit.org) and checked my JSPs files. Of course this
was a plan, why test Jedit If you are not going to test Tomcat? I got my files corrected and ready to
use them, then I opened Tomcat on a new Screen. Yes I know I could do it on Jedit, but that's my way to do it,
and the compilation and exception handling was OK.
After all that tests I got the impression that the Golden Code JVM 1.4.1 was faster than the IBM JVM 1.3.1 and I believe
that is going to be even faster.
Why upgrade?
Golden Code Development JSE 1.4.1 runs all my applications including server apps like Tomcat or
clients like JSuperChat (http:www.zion.com/products/jsuperchat/) without trouble. It seems to be faster than IBM JVM 1.3.1 on my 1.4 GHz Athlon
with 256 MB RAM and accessing DB2 version 6 as database.
I have not found a bug yet (lucky of me in a beta test), but again I had just a couple of weeks with
it. The instalation is simple, even when is not "pretty" and you don't have to modify the CONFIG.SYS if you
don't want. Since I did, I had to reboot, but some people may not want to do this.
Why not upgrade?
There are some missing parts still in the beta. Java Web Start(TM), the OJI plugin and WPS integration are not yet present.
The first two has been developed for Golden Code Development and is on it's way for the Sun
Certification, the last has been dropping on the priority list for them, but I hope they will have it soon for all of us.
Quick Conclusion
The product looks fine and I am positive about the future of it. (I would like as well to see Innotek add
on as part of the ODIN project, since we could, maybe, run more applications with it).
Also a bonus point to Golden Code is that the port is made to truly Warp APIs. That is, you are not attached to Microsoft's whims at all.
My user vision (not super vision) tells me to support this type of development.
Carlos de Luna Saenz
is a 32 years old OS/2 user since he discovered it, on 1992 with OS/2 2.1. He wrote
"Building the infrastructure for the internet" for IBM
on 1996 and has developed several projects for OS/2
(especially intranets) since then.
He also knows that being an OS/2 user in todays world
is to be more productive than others, even when the
people is not always willing to try, specially for the
lack of applications with NLS, but he is convinced
that the users can change that also.
