BeKaffe - Developer Release 2

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

BeKaffe is a virtual machine for the execution of Java applications and applets on BeOS.
It is a port from the well-known Kaffe OpenVM, which is available for a number of architectures
and is being developed through an open-source process.

This version is based on lightweight widgets, meaning that the GUI elements do not have a native BeOS look and are implemented in Java, using a minimal subset of the BeOS APIs.
An implementation based on native BeOS widgets is in early development and will be released soon!

You can find the latest news and BeKaffe releases, with all the source code, online at the BeKaffe web site:
http://bekaffe.sourceforge.net


INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION

BeKaffe can be run from any directory, so it doesn't matter where you install the files.

During the installation process, some lines are added to the .profile bash configuration file.
These lines are used to specify the default CLASSPATH and the PATH to the Kaffe executables
(just used when launching java or appletviewer from the Terminal, the GUI version is fully relocatable).

IMPORTANT!
When installing from a zip archive, remember to run the included InstallScript.sh by double-clicking it.


RUNNING SOME SAMPLE JAVA CODE

There are three ways to run Java applets: Java applications can be ran in the same ways and in two little more:

SAMPLES

You can find a number of sample applets in the samples folder.

Credits:
BigTime applet is Copyright © 1996, The Internet Conveyor Ltd.
Curve by Michael Heinrichs
Juggling by Christopher Seguin


WHAT'S NEW IN DR2 ?


DEVELOPMENT

The application and all surrounding modules are still under development by the BeKaffe team.
BeKaffe still needs a number of "finishing touches", so if you would like to contribute some time to the project, here are some areas where help would be very appreciated:

If you have doubts or would like some exotic feature added to BeKaffe,
contact the team via the bekaffe-dev mailing list.


TESTING

This kind of help is very appreciated because we need to expose the VM to an avalanche of Java code.
To avoid overlap, our standard test suites include the following: Bugs can be reported via the Sourceforge bug database, which is accessible also from our Web site.


WORK ON CORE VM (contact Alan L. Batongbacal)

DEVELOPMENT OF AWT AND JAVA LIBRARIES

DEVELOPMENT OF AWT WITH NATIVE WIDGETS (contact Tomaso Paoletti)

WORK ON BeKaffe FRONT-END (contact Tomaso Paoletti)

BETTER SUPPORT FOR SHARED LIBRARIES


BeKaffe release notes, Last updated: 6th July 2000