The deadline for the bounty is closing in on me. Sadly I won't have much time to work on it this week... so my fear is that the deadline will be delayed. Hopefully only a few days though.

My recent progress has surfaced a few specific issues I have to deal with prior releasing a beta version.

A piece of pie

One of the bounty goals is an SSH-client. The more simple telnet variant works, as can be seen in previous post. However, trying with SSH bubbles up an issue I'm well aware of, that I thought I could wait with. Converting the string "3.1415" to the actual value 3.1415, is actually performed in native code, meaning I need to implement the support for it. Its a rather complex amount of code, but luckily I don't have to do it myself since it has been taken care of in the GNU Classpath implementation. The existing code however doesn't compile out-of-the-box, so I have ignored it for now. I'm hoping this will only be a matter of hours fiddling with the existing source to make it compile in the Amiga environment. And then I'm hoping that the SSH client won't have anymore issues.

The file was how big?

One other issue, that I perhaps could get away without resolving immediately, is a strange issue with how classes are loaded by the JVM. Up until this point, all my classes have been residing in the bootclasspath, as opposed to the ordinary classpath. The bootclasspath should contain all classes needed for the JVM to start, and "user" classes, or rather, external thirdparty jars (for instance the SSH library, or the Twitter4J API) should reside in the ordinary classpath. The ordinary class loader uses Java code to load the classes while the bootclasspath loader uses native code. And there seems to be some issues with how my Amiga implementation reports the size of class files, because every time the JVM want's to allocate memory for the class to load, I get an OutOfMemory exception. Looking at my code and debugging, I really can't see where the size get messed up. The Amiga part correctly reports ordinary sizes, but on the Java side its almost as if using uninitialized variables, or some sort of unsigned/signed error.

Given enough time this week, I believe I could have solved these issues in time. However, my current workload and various after work meetings, minimize my JAmiga time to a value near zero.