WalterCon 2004: Mini-Interview With Bryan Varner.
Jun 21, 2004 04:05 UTC, by Chris Simmons, Senior Journalist
From the mmmm-lime department...

Despite the lack of sleep on both our parts, Bryan Varner and I had a nice chat while he was attending WalterCon. Thanks to the magic of BeShare, and a wireless internet connection, we conducted the following interview:
 
How has your WalterCon been, Bryan?
WalterCon has been a truely enriching experience. I'm very glad I came, I'm very glad I got to meet these people, and I'm even more pleased that the BeOS community has proven to be the calibur of people that I expected. It's been a blast.
 
You demo'd the Java implementation there, and how AWT has progressed. What's next on your busy schedule?
The AWT demo was mostly a proof. It was an absolutely minimal basic demo of how it's going to work once we get it completely going. I got that demo working about 8 hours before I got to the hotel.
 
I've been working rather hard toward that end of things for about the last two months. I know some windows on a screen that dump their location as you drag them and resize them isn't very impressive to most people, but the amount of work and the amount of _working_ code that has to be done to get this going is ... well it's .... it's just stinkin' huge.
 
The demo was a huge milestone, whether you'd believe it or not. It answered a lot of questions and overcame some of the biggest risks in porting the AWT. From here, we flesh things out, make them beefy, and optimize them as much as possible. There's still a _TON_ of work to be done. The Java port right now takes over 1.2GB of disk space and has over 48,000 files after a full build.
 
Will the design and porting efforts for Java have any bearing on the Network Kit for Haiku?
No. Not at all. The Java port currently is targeting OSBOS, with R5.0.1 as the development platform. If you've got R5, you'll be able to run Java.
 
How will users be able to install Java on BeOs/Haiku in the future? How can users now test what has been developed so far?
As I think Donovan mentioned in other words today, we're at the mercy of Sun, and the agreements we have with Sun, both as an organization and as individual developers.
 
Users will not be able to test anything. I'm sorry, but that's how things are. Sun will be handling QA on the port, but we can't start giving them things to test until we reach a ceratin milestone. We're within sight of the first milestone we have to reach to send things to Sun. We really don't know what kind of time-frame we're looking at.
 
As for installing Java on BeOS/Haiku, once Sun certifies the port meets their requirements and standards, it will be available for download. Either as a download at www.java.com or from beunited.org. I don't know all the details of our agreement with Sun, Simon is the person with the details on that.
 
Out of curiousity, how long does it take to fully compile the Java you have been working with, on a typical 1GHZ machine?
My 800Mhz P3 w 384MB RAM, 20GB 4200RPM drive takes 6 hours to do a complete build from a clean tree.
 
My Dual 1Ghz, 512MB RAM, 10G 10k RPM SCSI drive that I normally use for development (it's my main box) will do a clean build in 2.5 hours. Clean builds are rarely needed, and incrimental builds take long enough for a reasonable coding break.
 
Speculating a little into the future now... Do you see applications like LimeWire working perfectly in Haiku once Java is fully ported? I ask this for the non-technically minded users out there who don't fully know what Java is all about but do know how to relate to a typical Java application.
Absolutely. :-)
 
I hear you're recently open sourced JavaShare 2. Care to explain your reason?
I think JavaShare 2 is mature to the point it can live on it's own now. Also, I don't have the time to give it the attention that it deserves. Opening up the source and giving it to beunited.org (with myself remaining as project head) gives other developers a chance to help out BeOS users from quite literally around the world, improve their skills, and add features / fixes that I simply don't have the time to do anymore.
 
It's not that I'm not planning on working on JavaShare 2, it's that I'm allocating more of my time to other projects where I think I can be more of a help. Opening JavaShare 2 gives me a chance to do more, while giving others a chance to do more as well.
 
Thanks Bryan... I'll let you get some sleep now. ;) 
I'll let you get some sleep too Technix. Thanx man!