We had a small GNU Classpath meeting on Tuesday at the Linux Kongress in Saarbrücken, Germany. I drove down there for just that day. There were 6 others there: Dalibor Topic (Kaffe), Chris Gray (Wonka), Mark Wielaard (GNU Classpath), Sascha Brawer (GNU Classpath), Jean Daniel Fekete (Agile2D), Patrik Reali (JAOS).

I enjoyed it very much. The discussions were interesting and it was nice to finally meet some of the people involved with GNU Classpath.

We talked about how to implement Java2D. Jean Daniel has worked on Agile2D a Java2D implementation based on OpenGL. This is a nice starting point and OpenGL is available on virtually every platform. This would work for IKVM.NET as well. Sascha pointed out that I should really implement Java2D on top of the .NET System.Drawing classes (based on GDI+). That would be cool, but I think it would be too much work (for me).

I also had an interesting discussion with Patrik about JAOS, a JVM on top of Oberon (a sort of object oriented OS, if I understand it correctly). He faces some of the same problems as I do, with the integration of the two object models.

One of the conclusions of the meeting was that GNU Classpath is alive and kicking (and doing very well in terms of progress being made), but we need a little more publicity. So consider this my small drop in the bucket. If you are a Java developer and want to improve the state of free JVMs, please visit the GNU Classpath web site and consider helping out. In the near future there will be a new task list detailing some of the work that needs to be done (and it will include estimated required effort and skill set).