http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Java

JNLP on OLPC

• Java on the OLPC
• JNLP Handler

Other folks working on Java and the OLPC

• Cay Horstmann: The OLPC and Java

Problems

• The matchbox window manager allows only one window (some popup dialogs are exceptions) to be shown at a time. Moreover, it strips off the title bar and the frame border. Therefore if a window has no exit menu/button but solely relies on the exit icon of the frame, there's no way to close that window.

Aug. 22, 2007

Our work on Java on OLPC has been stalled due to lack of resources. There is a chance that some form of Java or something like Java will be part of the standard OLPC distribution. But there are complicated issues of licensing and distribution that need to be worked out.

Here are some more details:

From a technical point of view Jim thought that if the space Java takes on the "disk" was 20MB or less that would make it a good candidate for inclusion. And at 30MB there is still a chance for inclusion.

We have got Java 1.4.2 down to 30MB:
Shrinking Java Disk Footprint

But this required stripping parts out of Java that might not be legal to strip out.

With the Java 1.4.2 version we had working on a B2 machine, had just enough memory to run simple applications. Large applications became very slow, and eventually crashed. The later machines have more memory so we believe this won't be a problem, but we haven't tested it. An interesting note is when running an OLPC image in Parallels with the same memory configuration, the applications behaved better. I think this is due to the faster processor so it can do garbage collections more effectively.

Next Steps at this point:

• Verify that the last JDK works as stated on the OLPC wiki
• Try the approach detailed in the Shrinking Java page and see how small it can get
• Try this with the OpenJDK
• Figure out the legal distribution issues with Stripping out parts of the OpenJDK.
• Determine if the non-open parts of OpenJDK are necessasary.