Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 74925
Please remove java dependancy where possible
Last modified: 2008-07-29 16:32:29 UTC
According to wikipedia following functionality depends on JRE: -- * The media player on Unix-like systems * All document wizards in Writer * Accessibility tools * Report Autopilot * JDBC driver support * HSQL database engine, which is used in OpenOffice.org base * XSLT filters * BeanShell, the NetBeans scripting language and the Java UNO bridge * Export filters to the Aportis.doc (.pdb) format for the Palm OS or Pocket Word (.psw) format for the Pocket PC * Export filter to LaTeX -- But a lot of people don't want to install jre at all. And the question is not in the java license (it's GPL now). But the problem is rather in some technical details. Many people just don't want to have java and I guess that everybody become irritated because of the startup delay caused by java initialization. I am a java developer but I think that basic office suite functionality should not require jre. Can we expect to have basic office functionality (used in 90% of all cases) do not require java? I mean that it's ok to require java for some of the elements like JDBC driver support or HSQL database engine. But why should document wizards depend on jre? Thanks, Serhiy
I think Java dependancy is very small price to pay for the resources Sun invests i OO development.
TM->requirements: one for you
I agree that Sun did the great investments into open source software. I understand that you can't remove all java dependencies. But could this be removed for basic functionality such as document wizards and report related functionality? When you have Writer running and want to use some document wizard first you can receive message that this requires jre. But even when you install jre initialization of wizard takes very long time (compared to the startup time of Writer). It's ok to have java dependency but only when it is absolutely necessary. Thanks, Serhiy
at kpalagin I hope you do not mean it seriously. SO and OO.o had been the tool to promote JAVA and the company SUN by itself, to make money, and they succeeded with that, not always for the benefit of the software related to that. They had their time, it's over - obsolet - so yes, despite of some tools any dependencies to JAVA should be terminated. Martin
Let's be honest instead of moving to requirements. It's not going to get fixed to remove the java bits at this stage of the day. Though if you have patches to provide alternatives feel free to contribute them. e.g. help out on the gstreamer integration to drop the avmedia requirements and similar for the other java components.
Just one question. If removing java dependency is not the question for the current time what are you going to do with terrible performance of Writer document wizard initialization? Can java be removed at least from the wizards?
4bugzilla, Java can be used for other features as well, e.g., it will be needed for grammar checkers or Calc add-ins and as Java developer of an OOo extension I'm pretty sure that the speed of wizard is not connected to Java, our code starts very fast.
This issue is a duplicate. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 45709 ***
closing duplicate