OJE project

[Nic Ferrier]

For a while now I've been unable to get hold of Andrew Selkirk of the
OJE project.

Because of this, and other reasons, I would like to suggest that we
(by "we" I mean the GNU project) make OJE mail and activation projects
part of GNU.

I would like to request a project from rms and gnu-eval. Before I do
that however I thought I would ask for feedback from this group to see
if anyone here has strong opinions either way.


What is the OJE project?
OJE stands for Open Java Extensions. It's a project started by Andrew
Selkirk to develop free versions of Sun standard libs, like: javamail,
servlet, swing, etc... Basically everything under the javax.
namespace.

The project uses the LGPL for all it's code.

Andrew has concentrated on creating free versions of the published
spec classes, ie: the actual javax.whatever class files. In some cases
he has also provided implementation.


What is my involvement?
I am writing the IMAP provider for Javamail. This is a significant
part of the full implementation of javamail. I have also contributed
some code to a LGPLed POP provider that could be used with OJE
javamail. I'm hoping to convince the primary author of that to
contribute it to the project I'd like to set up.


What am I suggesting exactly?
That we create a new project (or a subproject of Classpath) for the
parts of the OJE project that are okay for release. This is:

- activation spec classes (no implementation yet)
- javamail spec classes (not yet finished)
- imap provider
- smtp provider
- pop3 provider (if I can persuade address@hidden)
- media spec classes
- infobus spec classes


Why am I suggesting this?
Well, as some of you will remember Andrew himself talked of bringing
the project under GNU (see the Classpath archives, recent (since
1.1.2001) history). I think it would be a good idea for several
reasons:

o the project might attract more developers at GNU
(I'm the only active developer right now)

o the project might get forgotten or lost at sourceforge
(if Andrew has disappeared we don't have any way of managing the
source code)

o GNU could do with offerings in some of the OJE areas


Should this be a subproject of Classpath?
There is only one reason why it might not be a good idea: the number
of people working on Classpath and who might work on this could be
quite large. That might be a bit of a headache to manage. The day to
day activity of the projects will be very different.

Even if they are seperate it seems clear to me that there should be
one project web site covering both efforts.


What would I call the new project? (if it is a new project)
I would suggest "classpathx" as a kind of tribute to classpath.


Any other points of interest?
There was some debate about how Andrew was getting this job done and
whether it broke any licence rules. The classes I've looked at do not
break any licence rules. I believe the controvesy was caused by
Andrew's decleration of how he intended to perform a Swiing port (he
was going to use introspection and class creation from javadoc).


Anything else?
Some time ago Paul Siegman and Mark Wielaard contributed an LGPLed
version of the javax.servlet classes to GNU. Classpath never got round
to importing the classes into a repository. I have now imported the
classes into the GNU-Paperclips project's repository.

The suggested project should probably take over handling those
classes as well (I'm quite happy to maintain them, or find someone to
maintain them).



Nic Ferrier
Paperclips project