Validator.nu Gets Out of the Java Trap

This week, I upgraded the operating system on the Xen virtual machine that powers validator.nu and html5.validator.nu to Ubuntu Hardy. This made at the OpenJDK package available. Previously, the server had run Sun Java 6 on Feisty.

With this upgrade, Validator.nu got out of the Java Trap. (I’m not sure if it ever was in the Java Trap in the sense that it would not have worked with GCJ and Classpath, but it certainly was in the Java Trap in the sense that finding out would have been too much trouble due to the number of dependencies.) The validator itself is Free Software. It depends solely on Free third party libraries and schemas. The code now runs on a Free implementation of the JVM and Java SE, which runs on a Free operating system on a Free virtualization solution.

Thanks to everyone who made OpenJDK happen!

Now the only non-Free ingredient one needs to run a fully functional copy of the Validator.nu software is a copy of the IANA language subtag registry file (not distributed with the software but by default pulled from the network each time the app loads).