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There's a bunch of new structures (foreach comes to mind, as do generics in Collections.), but if you know 1.3/1.4, then you'll be up to speed in no time.

Here is link to
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment 6 https://sdlc3e.sun.com/ECom/EComActionServlet;jses sionid=C4783514291DD63EE652A5C2135F4C43

Java's focus has always been on enterprise software development. Consider this quote from the Java EE 5 Tutorial on “Development Roles”:

After software is purchased and installed, Java EE components can be developed by application component providers, assembled by application assemblers, and deployed by application deployers.

Also consider the Java EE Architecture Overview diagram from the same document.

This “tutorial” is aimed at enterprise people with time and money to spend.

Java's focus has always been on enterprise software development. Consider this quote from the Java EE 5 Tutorial on “Development Roles”:

After software is purchased and installed, Java EE components can be developed by application component providers, assembled by application assemblers, and deployed by application deployers.

Also consider the Java EE Architecture Overview diagram from the same document.

This “tutorial” is aimed at enterprise people with time and money to spend.

Uh, Javac is not written in C++. It's written in Java. Download the source code and see for yourself. It's in the com.sun.tools.javac package.

I wonder why I never see the JVM start up when I compile with javac.

Because you aren't paying attention. Javac is in the package com.sun.tools, see documentation here.

When you're done reading, download jikes and use that instead.

Sun and Microsoft tend to be pretty fond of showing off the big names that use their frameworks, so finding "sources" for who uses what tends to be quite easy. For example: http://cn.sun.com/service/jcoe/down/JCOE%20eBAY.pd f

Online application services or one of these?

No, I got it, and I disagree with you. My amazement stems from the fact that some very smart people who I respect (the Linux kernel developers) are criticising the GPLv3 for things the discussion committees and the FSF are already addressing. I actually think that's clear from the original blog posting.

Yes, Sun has entered the effiency game. We are weaning ourself off Solaris/Sparc. However, I would consider their AMD offerings: Sun AMD Opteron servers. The Sun Fire X4100 claims 56% less heat than the Xeon conterpart.

It isn't really a 'wild rumor'. It is more of a 'prototype'. See:

http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/index.jsp

Via:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/10/17/ In-A-Box

I have no idea if Google is using these, building their own, not using anything like them, etc, but there they are.

To see what I actually said, rather than relying on the ZDNet extracts, you'll find the original blog posting here. It's linked from the article but clearly from some of the comments above some people haven't spotted the link.

You can read his explanation on his blog: http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/date/20061130 (under "Why GPL v2 Only?")

Microsoft has the best virtual machine with .NET, the best development tool with Visual Studio...

This is a rather subjective statement, and as far as .NET being the best VM, I say BS. .NET is proprietary and only works on M$ platforms. Relying upon a proprietary standard with regards to computer and network systems in business is a costly mistake. Mono folks need not chime in as they are taking a huge risk and I don't even want to go there. As a developer, I don't like either one (.NET or VS). I used to develop using VS and liked it, but have since found better tools that support multiple platforms as well as the real stanadards (as compared to the standards that M$ has decided upon. I also no longer have to deal with M$ platform bugs, quirks, and security problems.

If linux had any dev environment that was ANYWHERE NEAR as good as VC++, maybe I wouldn't despise working on it.

As for a decent IDE for Linux, there are several. I like Code Forge as it supports a wide range of languages, editiors, debuggers, compilers, assemblers, and source control. For the past year, I've been using Sun's IDEs for Java and C/C++. The UML modeling capability in Sun Java(r) Studio Enterprise 11 is great - make a UML model of your application and tell the IDE can generate the code from it (or do it the other way around: create the model from existing code). For getting a quick handle on how an application - or the Linux kernel - works, what all the functions, methods, opjects, etc. are, nothing beats Understand for C++ and Understand for Java. The Sun IDEs are cross-platform and free for registered SDN developers (free registration). Understand tools are not free, but well worth the money, and are also cross-platform. Code Forge is UNIX only.

The bottom line is: Saying Linux has no good IDEs or other development tools is not true and one only needs to look and select the one that they like the most. I've found I can develop applications on Linux, with Linux tools, far faster, easier, and cheaper than I ever have on Windows. That includes developing Windows applications (I simply do the GUI portion on a Windows box, if I need to).

PGA

Except that Sun solved all these problems some time ago with Java, which Google is a heavy user of. I'm not sure how you can claim .NET has the best VM (best in what sense) - it only works on Windows which makes it completely useless for anything I want a JVM for (yes I know about MONO but don't care - if I have to re-write my code to have it work on Linux it is of no more use to me than c++). In contrast Java has had Web Start (which is what Click Once does for .NET) for years, and applets, of course, which I've used on a couple of recent corporate projects (one to handle printing duties, the other as a mainframe emulator) quite successfully. And Java already runs on most things, like my Linux box, my mobile phone and my Windows desktop at work, which is nice. It also has the best IDE by miles in IDEA for its re-factoring and code reviewing capabilities alone, and two very good free alternatives in Eclipse and Net Beans. There's not too much trouble finding MSDN like documentation for Java from a variety of sources including Sun either.

I will say the MSDN is a great resource and Visual Studio 6 is the best C++ development environment around

I agree that Microsoft does have a very nice development approach, but to claim that ClickOnce is comparable to todays HTML/Javascript applications is really reaching. Corporate Users will likely have this ability (once the organization deploys .NET 2.0 runtime), but expecting Windows Live or Yahoo to give up on the AJAX binge for ClickOnce deplyoments is not likely. ClickOnce is more like Java Web Start. We've had that technology for years now, but for some reason, these web apps persist.

" NetBeans has solved all this by introducing a layout manager of their own, the so called Absolute Layout. Pro's are its extreme extensiveness, the con's are that if you wish to use it you'll have to ship it with your software because its not part of the standard Java Runtime Environment (JRE)."

The layout manager they created is now called GroupLayout and it is a part of Java SE 6, as javax.swing.GroupLayout. No additional libraries are neccessary. It's solved all my layout problems, I now use it for almost any form.

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/javax/swing/ GroupLayout.html

I haven't used Java in awhile, but I remember coming up with Shakespearean-esque curses to describe what I thought of GridLayout and their buddies.

I'm guessing you really mean GridBagLayout, since GridLayout is a different and very very simple layout.

I realize GridBagLayout is hard to learn, but over the years I've learned that you cannot avoid it.

Sun has tried three times to make a "simple" replacement for GridBagLayout. Each attempt utterly fails as a replacement (but each is useful for some other rare types of layout needs).

I've tried to make my own "simplified" version of GridBagLayout too. In fact, I suspect nearly every intermediate Java GUI programmer tries this at some point; it's almost a rite of passage. And it's always a failure. The reason is that UI layout simply is that complicated, and there's no way around it. If you think it's simpler, then you probably aren't aware of all the issues involved.

A UI builder won't make it any simpler. It will just make it easier for you to ignore the issues. The usual result of such "freedom" is that the resulting UI looks acceptable, but doesn't have acceptable behavior. For instance, to pick a simple case, a scrolling list doesn't resize when the window containing it resizes.

I haven't used Java in awhile, but I remember coming up with Shakespearean-esque curses to describe what I thought of GridLayout and their buddies.

I'm guessing you really mean GridBagLayout, since GridLayout is a different and very very simple layout.

I realize GridBagLayout is hard to learn, but over the years I've learned that you cannot avoid it.

Sun has tried three times to make a "simple" replacement for GridBagLayout. Each attempt utterly fails as a replacement (but each is useful for some other rare types of layout needs).

I've tried to make my own "simplified" version of GridBagLayout too. In fact, I suspect nearly every intermediate Java GUI programmer tries this at some point; it's almost a rite of passage. And it's always a failure. The reason is that UI layout simply is that complicated, and there's no way around it. If you think it's simpler, then you probably aren't aware of all the issues involved.

A UI builder won't make it any simpler. It will just make it easier for you to ignore the issues. The usual result of such "freedom" is that the resulting UI looks acceptable, but doesn't have acceptable behavior. For instance, to pick a simple case, a scrolling list doesn't resize when the window containing it resizes.

I haven't used Java in awhile, but I remember coming up with Shakespearean-esque curses to describe what I thought of GridLayout and their buddies.

I'm guessing you really mean GridBagLayout, since GridLayout is a different and very very simple layout.

I realize GridBagLayout is hard to learn, but over the years I've learned that you cannot avoid it.

Sun has tried three times to make a "simple" replacement for GridBagLayout. Each attempt utterly fails as a replacement (but each is useful for some other rare types of layout needs).

I've tried to make my own "simplified" version of GridBagLayout too. In fact, I suspect nearly every intermediate Java GUI programmer tries this at some point; it's almost a rite of passage. And it's always a failure. The reason is that UI layout simply is that complicated, and there's no way around it. If you think it's simpler, then you probably aren't aware of all the issues involved.

A UI builder won't make it any simpler. It will just make it easier for you to ignore the issues. The usual result of such "freedom" is that the resulting UI looks acceptable, but doesn't have acceptable behavior. For instance, to pick a simple case, a scrolling list doesn't resize when the window containing it resizes.

Netbeans has had a GUI builder for quite some time. It is a Sun product, and can downloaded as a bundle with the JDK: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download-netbeans.h tml

Whoever modded your post "Interesting" clearly has a sense of humor.

If you don't understand a comment, don't mod it overrated. Here's a clue: F3 & Jaxx

Almost every platform has a visual designer that serializes the GUI to resources (some XML, some proprietary binaries) and then attaches it to the controller at runtime.

Neither of which promote good MVC separation. In fact they tend to encourage violations unless you are a very disciplined coder.

Almost every platform has a visual designer that serializes the GUI to resources (some XML, some proprietary binaries) and then attaches it to the controller at runtime.

Neither of which promote good MVC separation. In fact they tend to encourage violations unless you are a very disciplined coder.

i seem to recall that there were some "equal-access for the handicapped" advocates that didn't have a buck to make off of MS Office that had concerns

after Microsoft had a "chat" with them, as I recall.

Furthermore, they are misinformed because OpenOffice has pretty good accessiblity support--just not on Microsoft Windows , due to Windows issues and no fault of its own.

Quoth Peter Korn

Users with disabilities might move to a UNIX/GNOME desktop, and utilize the assistive technologies there to interact with StarOffice or OpenOffice.org (or KOffice). For some disabilities this is unlikely to be an option for a while, but for others - especially users with major physical impairments who use single-switch, head-mouse, or eye-gaze systems - this is already an excellent choice. And for blind and low vision users, Sun is developing the Orca open source, scripting-based screen reader which shows tremendous promise in providing equivalent efficiency and productivity to commercial products in Windows.

[note: since this writing, Orca has been released and in Ubuntu Edgy]

Thats the shit with Sun, it makes no fucking sense! At one page they say "come download, use for free" and on another page they say "no, you need a license!". Its shit like that which make me carefull to pick stuff up from them. I don't think they r as bad as MS but you can never be too carefull!

I see where the OP is coming from, look here. There you see "download and use for free", and they tell you it includes messaging and calendar service. Ofcourse further down they tell you that you do need a license.

So yeah, the OP is right depending on what webpage you're reading. And sometimes what part of it! :)))

Sun has made their Java Enterprise System available for free for quite some time now. Guess what? One of the suites in it also features a full blown groupware suite which even supplies connectors for Outlook so that you can fully put your mail and calendar services onto Unix (-like) backends instead of an Exchange server.

I fail to understand why some people seem to feel that a Groupware server is the second most important thing for the opensource community, only to totally ignore software projects like these. Or is this boiling down to the boring old "Sun is evil" story? Well, at least Sun isn't selling its users out like Novell does and actually supports the Open Source Community even more than Novell has ever done so far (the last being my personal opinion).

Sun has made their Java Enterprise System available for free for quite some time now. Guess what? One of the suites in it also features a full blown groupware suite which even supplies connectors for Outlook so that you can fully put your mail and calendar services onto Unix (-like) backends instead of an Exchange server.

I fail to understand why some people seem to feel that a Groupware server is the second most important thing for the opensource community, only to totally ignore software projects like these. Or is this boiling down to the boring old "Sun is evil" story? Well, at least Sun isn't selling its users out like Novell does and actually supports the Open Source Community even more than Novell has ever done so far (the last being my personal opinion).

Are they going to ban Java as well?

http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/core/basic /intl/faq.jsp#imf

I've built a lot of web pages, and this has made me realize that it's incredibly quick and easy to whip up GUIs with HTML. The experience was much better than with the GUI builders I had used, and certainly beat coding GUIs by hand.

Of course, HTML is not intended as a language for describing native GUIs, so it has some limitations there. Fortunately, there is a variety of XML formats for describing real GUIs.

What makes XML so great for describing GUIs is that it's so good at describing nested objects. If you think about it, that's exactly what GUIs are: you've got your windows, with a bunch of widgets in it, one of which is a scrollable area with more widgets in it, etc. This is naturally described by an XML tree that contains all these widgets, with some attributes used for connecting them to the application; e.g. ids to allow the application to reference widgets, and embedded code to let the GUI respond to events (e.g. HTML's onclick).

Where many XML GUI languages fall short is in that they don't provide methods for building new abstractions. If you have a lot of subtrees that are all very similar (say, a frame, a title, a content window, and a hide and a show button), you'll completely have to code each of them in full. Any programming language worth its salt will provide a way to abstract over this (functions!), but I think the realization that XML GUI descriptions (and HTML documents!) are programs hasn't fully set in yet.

Next time I'm coding a GUI, I'll be generating the XML from a proper programming language. I've had good results with Lisp before...

Sun's HPC contribution is in optical chip interconnects, described (somewaht fluffily) at http://research.sun.com/spotlight/2006/2006-04-07_ Sun_on_HPCS.html

Fortress, the language being developed by a bunch of people led by Guy Steele, was funded as part of the HPCS effort. This means that DARPA is going with IBM or Cray's language (X10 for IBM, Chapel from Cray). According to a press release quoted at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2063043,00.as p (but not available at http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/index.xml) the work will continue, but how likely is it to succeed?

Guy Steele gave an excellent talk at OOPSLA on Fortress - the slides are at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/PLDITutorial Slides9Jun2006.pdf - I thought it was pretty impressive.

The groups's site is at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/

Fortress, the language being developed by a bunch of people led by Guy Steele, was funded as part of the HPCS effort. This means that DARPA is going with IBM or Cray's language (X10 for IBM, Chapel from Cray). According to a press release quoted at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2063043,00.as p (but not available at http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/index.xml) the work will continue, but how likely is it to succeed?

Guy Steele gave an excellent talk at OOPSLA on Fortress - the slides are at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/PLDITutorial Slides9Jun2006.pdf - I thought it was pretty impressive.

The groups's site is at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/

Fortress, the language being developed by a bunch of people led by Guy Steele, was funded as part of the HPCS effort. This means that DARPA is going with IBM or Cray's language (X10 for IBM, Chapel from Cray). According to a press release quoted at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2063043,00.as p (but not available at http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/index.xml) the work will continue, but how likely is it to succeed?

Guy Steele gave an excellent talk at OOPSLA on Fortress - the slides are at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/PLDITutorial Slides9Jun2006.pdf - I thought it was pretty impressive.

The groups's site is at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/

By contrast, IBM is one of the 3 remaining American companies that still makes general-purpose, complex, and powerful cores for crunching scientific applications. The other two companies are AMD and Intel.

While many of these companies (I'm looking at the North America region) may be too small/unknown for your tastes, companies like EnterpriseDB (and Command Prompt) are well established and have some very large clients including Sony Online and Vonage.

If you're a Solaris shop, don't forget that Sun offers PostgreSQL support, and obviously they can handle support for fairly large corporations.

By the way, here is a picture from the latest PostgreSQL developer's conference. There are very few "19 year old kids" in that group.

What a crap list, no mention of Radia Perlman.

I had searched before regarding the native widgets issue, but didn't find a good link, so that's why I asked you for a follow-up.

Anyways, thanks for your answer. Based on that, I did a search for "java desktop api" that led to this page. It's been 11 months since it was updated, but it's a good launching point.

First of all, let's all have a look at REBOL.

Secondly, what we need is a distributed and declarative programming language running in the 'web' browser. A web page should become a declarative description of a user interface, much like F3.

For example, if I wanted to make a simple login form, the code would be something along this:

let username = ''
let password = ''

let loginForm = page [
title = 'login'
layout = grid 2x3
label [text = 'username:']
textbox [model = username]
label [text = 'password:']
passwordbox [model = password]
button [text = 'submit' click = {close [form = loginForm value = true])}]
button [text = 'exit' click = {close [form = loginForm value = false])}]
]

let ok = do(loginForm)

if ok then
login(username, password)
else
doPage('loginFailed')
end if

function login(username, password)
let loginOk = server.login(username, password)
if loginOk then
doPage('mainScreen')
else
doPage('loginFailed')
end if
end function

In the above example, the UI is built in a declarative manner as a tree of objects, much like HTML. But there are no hardcoded tags: the final output is created by running the code in the page.

Furthermore, the calls to the server are part of the language specification: the language automatically knows how to call server functions, without any need to declare them somewhere.

Finally, the platform shall have lazy downloading, with classes downloaded when they are first instantiated.

Pages which do not have any logic and simply present information could then easily be built by using the declarative user-interface library.

Style mechanisms like CSS and resources would be data retrieved from external servers and applied to the UI.

If the page needs to do more things, for example to display a video, run a calculation, present a menu or a tree, run 3d graphics, etc it would be very easy: since the whole interface would be programmable, there would be no limitation.

The advantages over the current situation are:

1. the whole thing is programmable and there is nothing hardcoded.
2. the problem of distributed communication is solved right at the most fundamental level.
3. security can be applied to the whole of the language, since distributed communication is the foundation of the system.

The chips in smartcards and e-passports are a lot more sophisticated. They hold 64 kilobytes of data typically, and they have a processor that can do encryption and stuff. Some of them even run Java.

Strange that an article celebrating XML's anniversary would neglect to mention XML's creator. I wonder if the fact he works for a competitor has anything to do with it...

I looked at a couple of the popular ones, installed Awffull and played with it for a bit. But it wasn't immediately
obvious to me that any of the common ones supported aggregating stats across domains / hosts. Eg, I have 10 virtual servers on this
Apache box, give me a sorted list of hits per domain/host. Probably one or more of the popular open-source stats packages
*does* do this, but I didn't feel like spending hours examining different ones and installing them. Since my needs were very basic
I just wrote something of my own.

Since all my domains are ultimately served by a Java webapp running on JBoss (I redirect from Apache to JBoss with mod_jk) I just wrote a servlet filter to write hits to a postgresql database. That's it,one table with the hostname, date-time, user-agent, and a handful of other things I care about. Now, getting the info I need is a simple as a quick sql query with pgadmin III. Although I'm looking at using the Eclipse BIRT stuff for looking at the data, as my next project.

I looked at a couple of the popular ones, installed Awffull and played with it for a bit. But it wasn't immediately
obvious to me that any of the common ones supported aggregating stats across domains / hosts. Eg, I have 10 virtual servers on this
Apache box, give me a sorted list of hits per domain/host. Probably one or more of the popular open-source stats packages
*does* do this, but I didn't feel like spending hours examining different ones and installing them. Since my needs were very basic
I just wrote something of my own.

Since all my domains are ultimately served by a Java webapp running on JBoss (I redirect from Apache to JBoss with mod_jk) I just wrote a servlet filter to write hits to a postgresql database. That's it,one table with the hostname, date-time, user-agent, and a handful of other things I care about. Now, getting the info I need is a simple as a quick sql query with pgadmin III. Although I'm looking at using the Eclipse BIRT stuff for looking at the data, as my next project.

So the sparc processor doesn't count?

http://www.sun.com/processors/opensparc/

Enlightened yet?

They are still widely in use, but if you are up-to-date in Java web application technologies, you are probably aware that JSP is dead. This is not a troll. JSP is rapidly being pushed out by alternatives like Facelets (which is used to define JavaServer Faces views), Tapestry, and Wicket. All of these are XML, disallow any logic in the view (thus encouraging proper MVC), and do not require a mountain of boilerplate code to extend. Why anyone would use JSP these days is totally beyond my understanding. Confusing and hard to maintain, JSP is rapidly diminishing and releasing a new library targeting it is like announcing some great new technology for Windows 95.

They are still widely in use, but if you are up-to-date in Java web application technologies, you are probably aware that JSP is dead. This is not a troll. JSP is rapidly being pushed out by alternatives like Facelets (which is used to define JavaServer Faces views), Tapestry, and Wicket. All of these are XML, disallow any logic in the view (thus encouraging proper MVC), and do not require a mountain of boilerplate code to extend. Why anyone would use JSP these days is totally beyond my understanding. Confusing and hard to maintain, JSP is rapidly diminishing and releasing a new library targeting it is like announcing some great new technology for Windows 95.

And quite frankly I think that "open source software" as a whole is suffering tremendously from the lack of this feature. Its also one of the main reasons why I ran from Linux to Solaris the moment their x86 release (Solaris 10) managed to smoothly run on my hardware. Quite frankly, I think this issue alone is causing Linux never to really get onto the Enterprise market.

Just check, for example, Berkeley DB. A commonly used database package, now check how many versions are available on your distribution. Chances are high that you have multiple copies, basicly doing the same thing. However, program A depends on version 2.x while prograb B depends on version 3.x. And because this is a classic example of something not being backwards compatible you're forced to keep multiple copies around.>br>
Who is to blame? No one ofcourse since this is open source software, totally free to use as you feel think or like. Which is IMO the whole problem when you're looking at "open source software" in common. There are no rules, there are no demands and so one cannot expect (or better put: demand) quality. Yet on the other hand people do keep yelling and whining about how great the whole product is and how its capable to compete with every other product out there, from Windows to Solaris.

To those people I'd like to say: Welcome, to the real world.. Linux, as well as other open source operating systems, is indeed very capable and commonly accepted and used. But as we Linux users have kept telling Window users over and over again: Quantity doesn't make quality and it seems to me that this is exactly what most Linux zealots keep forgetting these days. Ofcourse, there is no denying that Linux has booked major successes and is commonly adopted. But its wrong to think that those numbers now tell you that Linux is just as capable as some of its counterparts. Whats that? This thing only happens with "lesser developers" or "evil company like developers" I hear? SO tell me, already forgot how gnu/tar (which I consider to be a key component to Linux) has done the exact same thing when they changed parameters?

If you were running on Solaris, it would "just fire up."

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/guarantee.jsp

It's not an off-hand comment. Schwartz has said publicly Sun are considering GPLing Solaris before. The key thing is it appears they're waiting for GPL3 before making a final decision.

I think the weeks that follow the release of version 3 of the GPL will be very interesting from the point of view of people interested in either Solaris or Java.