The Road to 1.0

[Aaron M. Renn]

The Classpath project has reached a milestone of sorts.  Five years ago
in March 1998, the Classpath project was born when I started work on a 
java.net implementation for the Japhar JVM project.  Shortly thereafter,
Paul Fisher and Brian Jones stopped working on Japhar in order to 
concentrate on writing a class library.  Thus Classpath came into being 
as a separate project with the inauspcious name of "JCL".  

Happy Birthday, Classpath!

I think it is truly amazing how far Classpath has come in that time.
While Paul and I haven't exactly been major contributors over the last
year and a half, other folks have really stepped up to the plate.

I think it is worthwhile to reflect on what we have as of release 0.05:

o A class library that almost fully implements the Java 1.1 spec, and
  which is a long way toward implementing even the most recent 1.4 spec.
  This includes standard extensions!
o Extensive API documentation.  Check it out at:
  http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/docs/api/index_noframes.html
o A great start towards a free Java library test suite in Mauve
o A great set of free replacements for standard Java tools, most
  notably javadoc.
o A number of great developer tools that can benefit people beyond the
  Classpath project - Japitools comes to mind.
o Probably even more great stuff I haven't listed or don't know about.

Given how far we've come, I'm prompted to ask, what is the road
to Classpath release 1.0?  Per Brian's 0.05 pre-release notes, he suggests
incrementing release numbers as is until at least we have a functional
AWT.  (Though let me quickly add that I can get our AWT to do basic
things).

It seems to me that there are a couple of routes we can take:

o Get AWT working right and fix any other major holes in Java 1.1
  support, increment the version to something like 0.9, then start
  debugging towards 1.0

o Stay in development mode indefinitely as future functionality needed
  for higher version support is added.

The original thought was always that we'd target Java 1.1 as our 1.0
release.  However, going into real release mode would make it trickier
to do development because of the implied stability contract with users.

Personally, I'd like to see Classpath reach release 1.0 some time prior
to its 10th birthday :)  Thoughts?

-- 
Aaron M. Renn (address@hidden) http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/