Moderator (MDR): MDR-Nancy Lee

Guest Speaker (SPK): SPK-name

MDR-Nancy Lee: Welcome to the Licensee Support Forum. Please begin to send in your questions as we wait for our second guest. Hi Rich and Tony. Thanks for joining us today.

SPK-tony: Hello

SPK-Rich Schiavi: Hi, it is a pleasure to be here

MDR-Nancy Lee: Rich and Tony, can you tell us what each of your roles is?

SPK-tony: We work with the Licensees, providing them with technical support, I am primarily concerned with helping customers port JavOS

MDR-Nancy Lee: Tony, since you work with JavaOS, can you answer this JavaOS related question?

SPK-Rich Schiavi: I work with mainly with the core JDK implementation and class libraries.

paradigm: The last time I looked, the only online documentation available was the White Paper. When will some more technical detail/documentation be available?

SPK-tony: There is a porting guide for JavaOS in the works, which should be available sometime next month.

MDR-Nancy Lee: What are some of the issues with porting JavaOS?

SPK-tony: It depends on how similar the platform is to our reference platforms. If they are using an x86, porting JavaOS is fairly straightforward. One needs to write device drivers for their ethernet and display board. These device drivers are written in Java.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Here's a question from paradigm on source licenses for education.

paradigm: Have you finalized plans for making JDK 1.1 source licenses available for education purposes? We have one for JDK 1.02, but so far haven't seen details of the same for 1.1.

SPK-Rich Schiavi: The policy and plan is to follow the same procedure as was used for 1.0.2. The source will be made available a short time after 1.1 is released.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Mitchgar has a question about debuggers.

mitchgart: Hi, I'd like to ask about debuggers. Are there licensees who are working on Java debuggers? Are they using sun.tools.debug or another interface? How's it going developing Java debuggers?

SPK-tony: Yes, there are licensees working on debuggers. We are working with them to define the interfaces that they need.

SPK-Rich Schiavi: The new debugger API is on hold until 1.1 ships, but once a draft is ready, we will post it to the web site.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Continue to send in your questions. Here's a question from uomini.

uomini: I'm interested in building a JavaOS coprocessor board for Wintel boxes. Do you know of any companies who have announced or are working on such a product? Are there any pitfalls I should look for?

SPK-tony: I don't know of anybody who has announced such a product. As far as pitfalls, currently to be "Java" you need to implement the entire Java API. This includes network and display support, which may be difficult on a coprocessor board.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Here's the next question from PaulWang.

PaulWang: How do you support licensees of new hardware or OSs? For example, if I wanted to license the VM for the BeOS and buy support, how would you support me? Would I have to send you copies of the BeOS and keep you up to date?

SPK-Rich Schiavi: Paul, our support model is very dynamic. We assist so many different areas of Java integration we can't just have one way of doing things. We basically provide one 1/2 time engineer and work with the particular licensee to determine how to utilize that engineer most effectively for that situation.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Paul Wang has a follow-up question.

PaulWang: Do you support any of the non-commercial folks, like Linux?

SPK-tony: We like having a Linux implementation of Java, but we have not been supporting it.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Paradigm has a question .

paradigm: Any chance I might see some box or other running a real live JavaOS at JavaOne?

SPK-tony: Yes, you should see several boxes, including Sun's JavaStation, at JavaOS at JavaOne.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Mitchgar has a follow-up question to the debugging API.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Terrywong has a three-part question.

terrywong: This question relates to licensees working on extensions for Java Workshop, and the Visual Java Toolkit, and is actually two-fold: Since the release of the product, there has been little in the way of in-depth expansion of the documentation or new widgets built on top of the framework. 1) Have you been working with JWS engineers to integrate the new event model and beans functionality into the product? 2) Have there been licensees who actively work on developing extensions to the product 3) Will there be a native development environment such as JWS for the JavaOS?

SPK-Rich Schiavi: 1) beans functionality and the new event model are indeed in JDK1.1

2) Yes, some licensees are working on extensions to the product in various areas. Some of these may fold back into standard extension, some will be endorsed extentions, and so forth. The details of all this are still being formulated.

SPK-tony: 3) Right now we use the GNU tools for developing JavaOS. We are working with third parties to develop better development and debugging tools for JavaOS, but it will be a while before anything will be available.

MDR-Nancy Lee: That's interesting. Here's another question from PaulWang.

PaulWang: Do you support developers as well as licensees?

SPK-tony: Our particular group does not support developers, unless they are also licensees. There are other groups that work with ISVs, including the Java Developer Connection.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Yes, the Java Developer Connection is the program that supports developers. Paradigm has a question.

paradigm: You've already said you haven't finalized plans yet for when 1.1 source licenses will be available. Any hints at all about a rough timeframe?

SPK-tony: JDK 1.1 Beta is available now.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Here's a question on PDAs.

spietrowicz: Mitshubishi showed a PDA at last year's JavaOne. Are there any other companies that are working on putting Java into PDAs? Have any of them made any announcements about availability of product?

SPK-tony: Yes, there are other companies working on putting Java into PDAs, but I do not know of any announced products at this time.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Paradigm would like to clarify a question he asked.

paradigm: I know the 1.1 Beta is available. What I'm asking about is the rough timeframe for finalizing plans on the source licenses, not the product itself.

SPK-tony: The source usually goes out shortly (within a few days) after the binary release.

MDR-Nancy Lee: These are good questions. We have time for a few more.

PaulWang: Do licensees get early access to new versions of software and/or plans?

SPK-Rich Schiavi: Yes, that is one of the advantages of being a licensee. They get access to source and plans regularly. Java is an open technology on which we work closely with our licensees on, so they must be in close contact with our plans as well as their plans.

SPK-tony: Yes, licensees get early versions of our source code and we try to keep them informed of our plans.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Paul Wang has another question.

PaulWang: How do I get a noncommercial source code license?

SPK-tony: In order to get a noncommercial source code licence, you need to contact our business development department.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Here's our last question for the forum from johnwest.

johnwest: I apologize if this question has been already asked; I've been having trouble logging on.

Can you please give us the status of the Java OS for x86 processors?

SPK-tony: There is an x86 port of JavaOS. The device support is somewhat limited right now.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Thanks everyone for joining us today. Thanks to Rich and Tony for being our guests.

SPK-tony: Thank you and good-bye.

SPK-Rich Schiavi: Thanks for having us.

MDR-Nancy Lee: Last moderator (me) signing off. The forum is now unmoderated

spietrowicz: Thanks guys, you do a great job for us, bye.

TomChavez: Good bye, all.