Will Java Run (Well) On A Pandora?

[Emnasut]

Hi all!

I stumbled over the Pandora project a few weeks ago (and got an order into the first batch, yay!) and can't await to get my hands on a Pandora (like everyone else I guess ^^)! I'm wondering though if-and how well-Java runs on the Pandora, does anyone know something about that? I know there is a "Java SE for Embedded 6" by Sun, would that be the right version and does it the same as a "normal" Java or are there missing features?
Also, do you think Eclipse would run on the Pandora for coding on the go?

- Emnasut

 

[Fzero]

greetz Emnasut, someone will be along soon to help with your query

not something i can answer im afraid, but its active here so you wont wait long - meanwhile, you know about their pandora wiki site?

http://pandorawiki.org/Main_Page

i did quickly look on there for java stuff but couldnt find anything, but a useful link for you no doubt

 

[Emnasut]

Thanks Fzero, that is indeed a useful site! The more I read about the project the more excited I get.

 

[ben_dash]

IcedTea, built from OpenJDK, seems to be the best option for Java. Once I get my Pandora I'll be trying it myself, but I seem to remember that someone already has that working on the BeagleBoard.

Since the Pandora only has 256MB or RAM I don't think that you'll get Eclipse running on it, and if you do it'll be starved for RAM and not run well. If you want to edit code on the Pandora then you'll need to use something lighter like Vim, Emacs or some other, simpler, editor.

 

[Wolenber]

Java will run, and you will be able to code on it. Whether Eclipse will run or not I don't know, but you could do it all in Terminal if you were that determined.

 

[juniorm33]

Regarding Java

Regarding Eclipse:
I would say that there's other editors about that would probably be more suitable for the Pandora. Can't remember the names of them of the top of my head sorry. But I use eclipse myself but I wont be on the Pandora.

 

[Emnasut]

Sounds great! Too bad about Eclipse but oh well, I bet there are other IDEs which will run. If all fails I guess I'll really just use Terminal/VIM and javac. Thanks for all the answers, this really is a great and helpful community!

- Emnasut

 

[juniorm33]

Sounds great! Too bad about Eclipse but oh well, I bet there are other IDEs which will run. If all fails I guess I'll really just use Terminal/VIM and javac. Thanks for all the answers, this really is a great and helpful community!

- Emnasut

There's already been a few discussed on these forums already, so you will definitely be fine.
I've probably got a couple bookmarked at home, if your unable to find anything.
Try the advance search, usually get a better search result from that.

Edit: More so context sensitive text editors than full blown IDE's. Considering the size of the Pandora, and how I plan to do my coding that is fine for me. Your requirements maybe different. It's not my primary development machine.

 

[hal9000]

Eclipse with 480 lines would be completly useless, even if you had enough RAM/CPU.

To code stright on the Pandora, with small screen and not programming oriented keyboard, I guess less verbose, higher level, more interactive languages like Python (PyGames!) or Scala will be more suitable.

 

[juniorm33]

Would something like kate do you?
There was a couple I was looking into (but I'm at work), but I'm sure someone else will be able to mention a couple.

 

[Emnasut]

Interesting, I didn't know Kate was context sensitive, I might just use that than.
And yeah, Eclipse really wouldn't be a good choice with the size of the memory and the screen...
Also as much as I love Scale (and like Python) I've already got a lot of Java stuff which I wouldn't want to code from scratch in another language. Though I'd mainly want to fix bugs / add small features on the go, no real full blown developing.
And thanks for the hint about the advanced search, I will try that and see if I have more luck in finding those threads.

 

[Creature XL]

If you want to edit code on the Pandora then you'll need to use something lighter like Emacs .

LOL

@topic (almost):
Do not expect wodners from teh OMAP3. It has no JAZELLE (HW Java-support).
The JAZELLE implemented into the Cortex A8 is just fake. A9 has a real JAZELLE implementation.

However, i have no clue how much the "real" JAZEELE really helps. Are there any benchmarks on the net?

Lastely as I saw IcedTea mentioned, no JAVA program I tried (not much, maybe 3) worked with it

 

[paulguy]

The pandora will probably have gedit, otherwise it'll be in the repo. It's a basic multidocument GUI text editor with code syntax highlighting.

Kate would be a poor choice since it depends on KDE, which is large, and even the crap that runs in the background along with a KDE app will fill the memory quickly.

 

[juniorm33]

The pandora will probably have gedit, otherwise it'll be in the repo. It's a basic multidocument GUI text editor with code syntax highlighting.

Kate would be a poor choice since it depends on KDE, which is large, and even the crap that runs in the background along with a KDE app will fill the memory quickly.

Yea, that was one that stuck in my head, probably because female name.
But there was others that I was more interested in....

 

[chole]

The pandora will probably have gedit, otherwise it'll be in the repo. It's a basic multidocument GUI text editor with code syntax highlighting.

Kate would be a poor choice since it depends on KDE, which is large, and even the crap that runs in the background along with a KDE app will fill the memory quickly.

Are you sure? I run kate remotely on my ARM-based SheevaPlug all the time. I just took a quick look, and running kate from a completely non-KDE start point decreased by free memory from 341MB to 327MB, a drop of 14MB. That's with several extensions (tab bar, file browser tool view, text filter, external tools, find-in-files tool view) and four text files open, and it doesn't seem to use up more memory as I continue to use it. Mind, that's a gigantic amount of memory usage compared to editing with vi or joe on the same machine, but I don't think it makes it a poor fit for a device with a quarter gigabyte of RAM.

 

[paulguy]

Well, just going by my experience... it might be possible that that build of kate didn't require the extra kde background stuff, or it may have already been in memory. If not for the reason of memory usage, it's enough to not have to install kdelibs and qt and stuff if you don't need it, since from what I can tell, the pandora is mostly going to have xfce/gnome/GTK+ stuff.

 

[PhillipJ]

Pretty sure the default browser (Aurora?) is built using Qt.

 

[Wheels]

I think they're using Midori as default, it's GTK+.

 

[chole]

From the official blog (April 13th 2010 entry):

As Midori was a bit unstable and FireFox eating up RAM, we changed browsers once again. Arora is now included in the OS. Fast, without any rendering issues and it didn't crash yet for me.

Anyway, when you run kate, the processes that appear in memory are kded4, klauncher, kdeinit4, kio_file. It may seem cluttery just by way of being multiple processes, but the overall memory usage isn't wild at all for a complex graphical application like this. The other graphical app I use frequently on the plug is Pidgin, and it turns out that uses the about same amount of memory as all those kde processes, except that everything's in a monolithic, single process. *

I don't think it makes sense to limit an entire major grouping of applications from easy PND installation by kicking out its basic common libraries. You can make a case for not including kde libs in the default ROM (just like you'd probably nix the libgnome* packages), but Qt is found in a ton of useful applications and shouldn't be ignored just because it's not as popular as another widget set. If that sort of thing were so important, we'd be right now discussing whether to go with MFC or .NET for an x86 portable in this thread. There's certainly enough space for such a powerful and widely-used library. I might argue for including the very basic kde libraries (that'd be libkde4, libkkdecore4, and the kdebase4-runtime package), but that's something I'd really want to do a deeper analysis for (that is, I'm too lazy to check if kstars needs any other libraries right now).

Also, I program in Qt**, so my pithy apps won't appear on Pandora if it's Gtk-only. ;P





* apples and oranges, the best kind of comparison!

** on multi-gigabyte data sets, so I'm useless here, but at least I'm good at empty threats!

 

[Kramy]

Do not expect wodners from teh OMAP3. It has no JAZELLE (HW Java-support).
The JAZELLE implemented into the Cortex A8 is just fake. A9 has a real JAZELLE implementation.

I thought it basically had bounds-checking support, and that was it? Should be good for a whopping 2-5% performance boost, but nobody has actually figured out how to tap into the hardware?