Escaping the Java Trap: A practical road map to the Free Software and Open Source alternatives

For the last couple of years the community has been working to ensure that developers can create applications using the java programming language without having to depend on proprietary software. Today, the free (as in libre) implementations are already very capable and support a vast amount of functionality that developers expect from a java-like environment. Important large applications like JOnAS, OpenOffice.org 2, Eclipse 3 and Tomcat 5 are known to work. This document provides a road map of the various projects; how they work together, where they are, where they're going, and how we make sure that they work well and are compatible.

Please take a look at the road map in one of the following formats:

  1. HTML (thanks to Baron Schwartz)
  2. PDF
  3. OpenDocument (thanks to David A. Wheeler)
  4. OpenOffice 1 (.sxw) format

If you have constructive comments, please send them to Mark Wielaard (mark at klomp dot org) or the mailinglist.



Explaining the process

The first draft

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