This just in... deet deet deet.

Java for BeOS is real. I repeat... It's real.

Here's what BeUnited has to say:

"After a wild weekend of coding and BeShare chat sessions the beunited.org Java Team has some progress to report. The team has been able to create a working version of the J2SE 1.4.0 JVM that runs under BeOS R5 and actually interprets Java byte code. This is still early in the development, but for the first time the JVM has interpreted the java.lang.String class and others. This is after the team spent 2 months trying to debug a serious flaw in the native code generation of the hotspot engine. Progress should be rapid after this point as most of the hard work is now complete. The next step is to have the JVM complete its initialization and run 'hello world'."

You can now go back to your regularly scheduled programme. ;)

Actually, I knew about their work for months, but I was under an oath of secrecy, which I've kept until of course they announced an update, which they did. ;) This is a fantastic development for the entire BeOS Community, which I'm sure everyone will appreciate just how hard the group has worked to achieve this milestone.

Sun and BeUnited have been working on porting Java 1.4 to BeOS since at least the summer of 2002.