Winners of OpenJDK challenge announced

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL: Sun Microsystems Inc., has announced the winners of the OpenJDK Community Innovators' Challenge designed to fuel innovation around the OpenJDK project. The contest was part of Sun's Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program, a multi-year program running across several open source communities with a $1 million total prize.

The OpenJDK Community Challenge is intended to encourage and reward developers who are working together to solve key problems, initiate projects that promote new uses for the code, develop curricula and training, and port the OpenJDK code base to new platforms.

“The OpenJDK Challenge gave me the opportunity to work on an open source project I dreamt about for years but never had the time to work on,” said Gold Medal winner, Clemens Eisserer. “I hope my project will help Java software on Unix become an even better platform in the long run for client applications, I already have plans to enhance performance and support for more platforms.”

“We're very happy with how the Challenge turned out,” said Mark Reinhold, Principal Engineer for Java SE and OpenJDK at Sun. “It was fairly difficult to choose amongst the completed projects, all of which were technically impressive but touched very different parts of the platform.”

The OpenJDK Community Innovators' Challenge categories and winners are:

•  
• Silver: Neal Gafter for the Closures for Java project
• Bronze: Stephen Colebourne and Michael Nascimento Santos for the Provide date and time library from JSR-310 project
• Bronze: Roman Kennke and Mario Torre for the Portable GUI backends project

Sun is celebrating the growth of the open source community throughout the month of September. In addition to OpenJDK, Sun's open source portfolio of products includes GlassFish, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, Open Storage, NetBeans, MySQL, PostgreSQL and OpenSPARC.

OpenJDK Community

OpenJDK is the open source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) specifications and an open source community for the ongoing development of Sun's implementation of Java SE. Within the OpenJDK Community developers gather to collaborate on the open source JDK code base and related projects. Through the OpenJDK project, developers can participate along with their peers and directly influence the future of the JDK implementation. OpenJDK is licensed as free software under the GPLv2.

Gold: Clemens Eisserer for the Implement XRender pipeline for Java2D project