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Interview With James Gosling
Def Mango Raygun writes "There is an interview with James Gosling of Sun. He talks about some language features and why they happened. It's short, but informative"
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I myself code just about everything in a server-sided web application. I can extend this to the desktop using Java, but to date have not seen a need. I know it takes more time this way than to fire up Visual Basic and create an application that way, but I don't run Windows, and my programs work on just about any system.
As for the imbedded market, Java has the capabilities, but I don't know if developers are going to embrace it much with licensing issues, code changes between releases, and the increasing number of non-Java tools that effectively get the job done.
Five years? Java will be with us, and there will be more of it out there. That might really be its peak usage before it falls like RPG, COBOL and other great languages that revolutionized computer program development.
Click here or here.
From the article:
JDC: Is it possible to submit the Java [technology] bytecode specification to a standards body like ECMA [and the like]?
JG: Well, we actually tried to do that; to submit it to ECMA. And that exploded and turned into a rather bizarre episode. And actually, after that exploded, ECMA did an internal investigation and published a report, which is very interesting reading.
Does anyone know what he's talking about? I saw this interview a while ago and have looked around in vain for the report he mentions. This would certainly be interesting, especially if, as I somehow suspect, Microsoft did something to prevent Java from becoming a standard.
Well, I like java, but it's still special purpose to me. It excels in ecommerce and dynamic web stuff. It may someday excel at distributed systems since it will be easy to move code around various devices on a network.
It's not a general purpose platform or language, imho, however. But there is one thing that would make it that way... hardware VMs... which would be JavaMs, of course, since they wouldn't be virtual.
Where are the processors that run the java code on the chip directly?
-pyrrho
Your post is funny but this is a real issue. The company I work for wantJAVA had to change all their content to be In accordance with Sun's Trademark Policy. So now our site is covered with "[TM]". We also can't even use the name wantJAVA anymore.
From our Espresso Pricing page:
J2EE[TM] 1.3.1
JMS[TM], CMP[TM], JNDI[TM]
JMX[TM] Based
JCA[TM], JTA[TM]/JTS[TM]
I guess they need to protect their trademarks.
The thing is, Java's strength is it's very weakness. Java is a platform neutral by design, so it's rather clunky when compared to a platform specific language. You won't ever see a game written in Java, not because Java is slow, but because you can't use Direct X with it(or whatever platform specific lib you want).
I think Java is going to own the embedded market. A cell phone company can create Java software and it can happily switch around the cell phone hardware as much as they want and still use the same single piece of software.
Palm Pilots are still popular for this same reason. There are tons of Palm apps that run on them and the new Pilots are software compatible with the older ones.
.NET appears to be different than Java in that it makes no attempt at being platform neutral, rather it tries to be language nuetral. Python.NET, VB.NET, C++.NET all compile down to the same CLR. And a VB.NET developer can use Python.NET libraries.
I think this will dominate the application market.
Every interview I read on James Gossling, I read "how people are doing all sorts of exiting things on the desktop with it" and some other stuff such as how it is getting into "the embedded space". (what is embedded space? Did an astronaut get some vacum in abottle and bring it back with him?).
At the same time I read how SUN marvelousy manages to fuck things up with respect to their favourite language on the client side. Granted, it is huge on the e-commerce side of things, but things like JSP are too complex for simple backend applications that are far more easily handled in PHP or ASP. The mobile market seems to like it and it might become big there too, given that ARM and others are making processor core that handle bytecode natively, but that's not yet a given.
What stresses me is that, from the beginning, SUN mishandled Java and played into MS' hands for a number of reasons:
1.When it first came out it became very popular very quickly because of it's ability to provide pixelated aliased dancing Dukes and and sound to web pages. However Sun never bothered to push the point and try to improve performance and load times. People got very tired of seeing pixelated images floating across the screen that took minutes in some cases to load on early modems. They just sat there on their butts and ignored the fact that AWT was hideous, ungainly, and in no way worked very well across platforms (I mean on the Mac or Unix for example) and lacked important controls.
2.One of the things that played into MS' hands was the above and the fact that SUN made Java native interaction very difficult or at least non-trivial to implement, so that people who would have otherwise been able to make GUI controls and interface in C/C++ were put off having to slog through JNI. Along came MS with their JRI (or whatever it was called) which enabled all the hordes of MS developers to easily call MFC and other Win32 stuff directly from the classes. It was an easy picking and whose fault was it. It was or should have been obvious that MS would try to scupper anything that anyone else did (Custom ActiveX never became very popular but it did serve the purpose of making more FUD enter the arena) and the need for easy native access was defintely there. I know that it might have neccesitated changes in the security model but SUN didn't listen or was too confident or just too plain stupid when you look at the ugliness of their desktop for example.
3.Eventually they did listen and came up with Swing, which was so slow on machines of the time (ever run the Swing demo stuff on a 223MHz x86?) that it put off many companies and developers, who just carried on using VB because it was a no contest in terms of GUI response. And this although Swing looked very good.
Why did SUN ignore all the compaints? Why did they make native access so difficult? Why didn't they just improve AWT? Why didn't they try to look at it from a consumer point of view, which is what all those people watching the moronic applets of time were. Applets have all but dissapeared on the web and 99% of interactive shit is done with Flash today. Why didn't they try a trick from the MS book and try to implement things like the JVM starting up on boot or browser launch to make Applets start faster? Why did SUN make such a huge fuss of MS ignoring Java in XP when they couldn't even be bothered to make a marketing push for, IMO, some pretty neat stuff like WebStart?(who actually uses this?)
MS may be an abuse monopoly but SUN has it's head in the clouds up with the bosses of big banks etc and seems too dumb to try to see things from a consumer point of view.
(Sorry for the rant. I think they need it.)