antforge.org

As some of you might have heard (or deduced from my lack of activity), I have left Cacao. This is not a decision I took lightly, hence it took me some time to make it official by the means of this post.

I started my work on Cacao in 2005 with my first project being the ARM port of the code generator, which turned out to be my bachelor thesis and hooked me up with Cacao. I continued to actively contribute to the development of Cacao and tried to help push it towards being a real Java Virtual Machine.

The Java Remote Method Invocation API is a great thing to have because it is available in almost every J2SE runtime environment without adding further dependencies. However there are some implications when using RMI and I just cannot get my head around them:

1. Interfaces used as remote interfaces need to extend java.rmi.Remote. Interfaces should be clean and not contain any clutter introduced by a certain technology.

Since a few days Cacao successfully starts OpenJDKs JMX Monitoring and Management Agent if requested to do so. This allows you to remotely connect to Cacao with any JMX-compliant monitoring tool. One of the main responsibilities of this agent is to act as a server for MBeans (managed beans). The JRE provides some basic MBeans which allow out-of-the-box monitoring and management of VM internals. But applications can easily extend the functionality by providing custom MBeans.

After several months of struggle and countless efforts trying to avoid it, I finally did it. This is my very first blog post. Furthermore it is a greeting to all the people out there who are interested in what I have to say.