IcedTea

[Jung-uk Kim]

On Tuesday 03 August 2010 03:10 pm, Scott T. Hildreth wrote:
> Has anyone tried the latest IcedTea dist (1.8 I think), which I
> believe has the Java plugin?

I haven't tried the lastest IcedTea but I have experimented with some 
old versions.  FYI, you cannot use IcedTea as is because it is just a 
bunch of patches and build glues for Linux distros.

> Is this the way FreeBSD will provide the Java plugin or is there
> still hope that Oracle/Sun will opensource the plugin code?

Theoretically, you can build the IcedTea plugin with FreeBSD OpenJDK 
ports.  Last time I tried, all I needed to build the plugin was 
liveconnect, netx, and plugin directories and some patches in 
patches/extensions from the IcedTea tarball.  Of course, you need to 
write some build glues, which is, well, not so trivial.  Any way, I 
was able to build it but it was incomplete because we didn't have the 
latest libxul in ports tree to make it work at the time.  I believe 
Gecko porting team is working on it and I may try it again if I find 
some copious free time. ;-)

> I know this has been brought up before, with firefox 4 in the works
> I'm sure it will require a newer java as well.

FYI, Firefox has nothing to do with Java version itself.  Mozilla team 
just removed the old Java plugin API (OJI) from newer Gecko engines 
and that's all.  I think "Look, Sun has released plugin binaries with 
the new API for Linux!  Let's kill the old API." was really really a 
bad decision because 1) Sun promised but never released the sources 
after all, 2) it pretty much killed all third-party OJI plugins 
including my Diablo plugin for FreeBSD/amd64.  Of course, you can 
stay with old Firefox and friends but...  Sigh...

Jung-uk Kim