[Rd] status of Java & rJava?

[Adrian Trapletti]

Simon,

Java is still one of the most popular languages out there, in
particular in large organizations. See e.g.
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ . However, there has been a lot of
confusion because of Oracle's licencing change in 2019. But the good
news is, there are more alternatives than ever. See e.g.
https://labs.consol.de/development/2019/02/05/oracle-license-is-the-free-lunch-over.html
. And also Oracle has a very interesting new VM significantly
improving startup time, the community edition is under GPL-2. See
https://www.graalvm.org/ .

Cheers,
Adrian

Adrian Trapletti

Steinstrasse 9b, 8610 Uster, Switzerland
P +41 44 994 56 30  |  M +41 79 103 71 31
adrian using trapletti.org  |  www.trapletti.org


On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 12:02 PM <r-devel-request using r-project.org> wrote:
>
> ...
> Message: 4
> Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2020 16:07:13 +1300
> From: Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek using R-project.org>
> To: Spencer Graves <spencer.graves using prodsyse.com>
> Cc: "r-devel using r-project.org" <r-devel using r-project.org>
> Subject: Re: [Rd] status of Java & rJava?
> Message-ID: <30424EF3-FD2E-44DB-8D7A-C5EC976F47B2 using R-project.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Spencer,
>
> you could argue that Java is dead since Oracle effectively killed it by removing all public downloads, but if you manage to get hold of a Java installation then it works just fine with R. To my best knowledge there has never been an issue if you installed rJava from source. macOS Catalina has made binary distributions impossible due to additional restrictions on run-time, but even that has been how solved with the release of rJava 0.9-12, so please make sure you use the latest rJava. In most cases that I have seen issues were caused by incorrect configuration (setting JAVA_HOME incorrectly [do NOT set it unless you know what you're doing!], not installing Java for the same architecture as R etc.). If you have any issues feel free to report them. rJava 0.9-12 has quite a few changes that try to detect user errors better and report them so I strongly suggest users to upgrade.
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
>
> > On 29/03/2020, at 9:18 AM, Spencer Graves <spencer.graves using prodsyse.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello, All:
> >
> >
> >       Is Java being deprecated for R?
> >
> >
> >       I ask, because I've been unable to get rJava 0.9-11 to work under either macOS 10.15 or Windows 10, and I can't get rJava 0.9-12 to install -- and my Ecfun package uses it:   I can't get "R CMD build Ecfun" to work on my Mac nor "R CMD check Ecfun_0.2-4" under Windows.  Travis CI builds "https://github.com/sbgraves237/Ecfun" just fine.
> >
> >
> >       The rJava maintainer, Simon Urbanek, has kindly responded to two of my three emails on this since 2020-03-20, but I've so far been unable to translate his suggestions into fixes for these problems.
> >
> >
> >       Should I remove rJava from Ecfun and see what breaks, then see if I can work around that?  Should I provide the error messages I get for rJava from "update.packages()" and / or library(rJava) on both machines, with sessionInfo() to this list or to Stack Exchange or Stack Overflow?
> >
> >
> >       Since I'm getting so many problems with rJava on under both macOS and Windows 10, that suggests to me that potential users could have similar problems, and I should try to remove rJava from Ecfun.
> >
> >
> >       What do you think?
> >       Thanks,
> >       Spencer Graves
> >
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