It’s A Symphony

Ever worried about downloading Eclipse plus an additional JDK? Don’t worry any longer. There is now a perfect Open Source combination waiting for you. You can download the latest release here.

It’s the Eclipse SDK 3.2.2 (EPL) bundled with an Apache Harmony JDK milestone (ASL) – one click, one download, one install. Big “Thank you!” to the Harmony guys and an awesome Eclipse Evangelist who put this together for us. 🙂

Please note, Apache Harmony is still under active development and not yet complete. Hopefully, the comments below will make that clear.

4 thoughts on “It’s A Symphony

  1. This isn’t something that’s been created by the Harmony guys AFAIK. Harmony released a milestone a while ago, and it’s capable of running Eclipse, but it’s not a full implementation (and certainly can’t be called Java yet, since it is yet to pass the TCK).

    At the least, please edit the blog so that it doesn’t have ‘JDK’ next to ‘Harmony’, since that may not be correct. Better just to say ‘Early access Harmony milestone’ or some such.

    Worse, this may give the impression that Harmony is finished and stable, and people can get negative impressions when it’s not fully compatible.

  2. It’s an effort that has been going on for quite some time now together with the Harmony guys to create this bundle. There were several Harmony builds produced and tested before this particular bundle was created and published.

    As for the TCK pass, I’m not sure but from the buzz recently it sounds also like a political issue.

  3. Really? The earliest entry on the mailing list about it was 20 April. That’s barely a couple of weeks. There was certainly no announcement sent (other than mine) about this turning up.

    I mention this because whilst Harmony is stable for what it is, the coverage isn’t complete yet and pretending that it is isn’t going to help anyone. What Harmony needs is people willing to put the effort in for testing; the eclipse-harmony project will definitely help as that. But pretending that it’s a stable, fully-featured pairing isn’t.

    As you probably know, I’m a contributor to Harmony as well as Eclipse. In fact, I’m working on the pack200 (de)compression, which is used by the update manager, and that doesn’t work at all yet. There are other reports, like subclipse incompatibilities, that are known and probably others that aren’t.

    So my main reason for complaining about this is that nowhere in your post or on the sourceforge site does it say that it’s using a Harmony milestone build, and that it’s guaranteed to be feature incomplete at this stage. Nor have you posted any links of where to file issues or raise them with upstream Harmony project.

    As for the TCK pass; you’re not allowed to call it ‘Java’ before it passes that. The same issue may be true of acronyms like JRE and JDK, which is why I brought it to your attention.

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