Java Support On Pandora

[pder]

Does anyone know what is planned to be used for Java support in Firefox on the Pandora? I was doing a bit of research on all of the different free implementations of Java and am still a bit confused.

From what I can tell, the official OpenJDK from Sun does not have support for ARM nor is it easily portable due to quite a bit of assembly code mixed in with the C++ code base. The IcedTea project is a fork of OpenJDK with the goal of making OpenJDK usable using only free software. In addition, a no assembly version of the JVM interpreter (called zero) was created which allows it to be ported to any architecture.

I am mainly interested in Java support for things like Yahoo games, and a few other online board games that I play.

Anyone know any specifics on what will actually be used and how well it should work in terms of compatability and performance compared to the official Sun JVM?

 

[God Ginrai]

Does anyone know what is planned to be used for Java support in Firefox on the Pandora? I was doing a bit of research on all of the different free implementations of Java and am still a bit confused.

From what I can tell, the official OpenJDK from Sun does not have support for ARM nor is it easily portable due to quite a bit of assembly code mixed in with the C++ code base. The IcedTea project is a fork of OpenJDK with the goal of making OpenJDK usable using only free software. In addition, a no assembly version of the JVM interpreter (called zero) was created which allows it to be ported to any architecture.

I am mainly interested in Java support for things like Yahoo games, and a few other online board games that I play.

Anyone know any specifics on what will actually be used and how well it should work in terms of compatability and performance compared to the official Sun JVM?

IIRC, we eventually got some form of Java on the GP2X, so if we could get it on that, we can at least expect to get whatever we got on the GP2X on the Pandora.

- God Ginrai

 

[Vorporeal]

I remember that the Cortex-A8 has some form of Jazelle, which has something to do with Java VMs or whatnot. We should have _some_ kind of support.

 

[andys]

I remember that the Cortex-A8 has some form of Jazelle, which has something to do with Java VMs or whatnot. We should have _some_ kind of support.

It requires specially written VMs for Jazelle - either form.

http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/java/openjdk6-armel/

the JDK is available, although it would appear that there is no JIT support in it at the moment for ARM. However I imagine it would not be impossible to add, and there are alternative VM engines, coupled with the (large) standard library, it would probably be sufficient.

 

[PhonicUK]

There's always the Blackdown JRE, I can't see why that would be any more than a simple recompile. Granted it wouldn't be as fast as the special VMs to take advantage of Jazelle but it should at least be fairly simple to get going.

 

[dflemstr]

To me, a JRE would be kind of cool. If we get one that is fast (approaching 50% of C-speed, for example, which is possible with JIT), I would start making a game engine in Scala for rapid game production, with physics, 3D etc . (And with rapid, I mean RAPID, in the kind of way that 40 lines of code could give you something like Gradius in no time )