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"MS Killed Java" (on the Client) JL Founder
jgeelan writes "In a commentary titled "Microsoft Killed Java" the founder of JavaLobby, Rick Ross, revisits the 'death' of Java on the client.
"Five years ago, almost to the day," Ross declares, "Microsoft shipped IE4 with a JVM that was intentionally engineered to provide leverage to corrupt and pollute Java compatibility standards."
According to an Associated Press report, Microsoft Corp has until only October 4 to respond to Sun Microsystems' request for a federal court injunction requiring Microsoft to integrate Java into Windows."
Take a look at Dan Bricklin's hysterically funny parody of client-side Java. It says it all. Just as funny and relevant as when it was written.
.NET can avoid the same issues.
It will be interesting to see just how
Demo software like Bricklin's is usually used to present a positive view of technology that doesn't exist... this is the first time I've ever seen demo software used to present a negative view of technology that DOES exist.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
(disclamer, I've not actually read the article)
If there is a reason that java died on the client it is becuase still to this day, if you wish to make a program that is competive with a normal C/C++ client, it requires the same amount of work. There is no advantage to using Java, in fact many times you end up doing more work to get the same job done.
If you want speed, then you can't use Swing. Swing is nowhere near as responsive to the user as a AWT or even faster, a native API application. Though it is much faster to develop with then Win32 API. So unless you want your application to be percieved as 'slow' you have to do many tricks that are difficult and hack-like.
Java's strengths are that it's easier to use thanks to GC, an OO api (that is usually extendable) and a large standard API. Some weaknesses are bad memory model, API is too large and abstract (in some places) and lack of support for native extensions. No matter what you say, it sucks that you have to get out a C compiler anytime you want to interface with a part of the system that the Java API designers didn't design in. Another thing that I don't like is that I think that they should do a code audit and get rid of all depreciated methods.
Java has killed itself on the client, not anyone else. Applets were shoehorned into the community of non-developers. Programmers may have made the tools that make the web possiable, but they did not make the web what it is today. Flash is made for tech-artists, those people who don't really want to program, but can get enough done to get what they imagine on the screen. Java never filled that niche, it's a 'real' programming language that can display stuff in a browser.
I use Java every day, and I like it but I know its pitfalls all too well. Having to make up for them is what we Java developers do.
No, you won't find many Java applications at the best Buy next to Reader Rabbit and My Greeting Cards Maker. But you won't find SAP, OneWorld, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, or Oracle 8i either. Doesn't mean they're not viable. I have Tivoli Service Desk 6.0 running on my PC right now, and it works perfectly using both Sun and MS JVMs (haven't tried it under IBM's on my OS/2 box yet). I also use a great Java telnet client on my website (only locked down, unpriviledged, single-application clients connect to it) to allow access to a VMS box.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The fact is they had a license with SUN, they violated it. They used that violation to kill netscape, than they used the fact netsacpe was done to kill Java.
I would normally agree with what you write, but you still think that Microsoft is a dominant evil, and anybody out there has to compete with it. This doesn't make any sense. Microsoft is a company whose main goal, as Sun's is, to make money. They make decisions based on this simple fact. They don't have to compete with everybodyelse on the market. They don't necessarily be anti-colloborative or the other way. They do business. Once you see this fact, you can better concentrate on what you are doing, rather than complaining to Slashdot and other magazines against Microsoft. Microsoft became too big now, that no matter what it does, or it doesn't everybody blames them feeling the comfort that nobody will object or dare to object to their ideas. Sun will continue to screw up, because they don't compete, they complain and cry, and sue. It is almost very funny, they complain that they should include Sun's Java in Windows distribution, but then they also go and sue Microsoft for distributing it on the web. This type of behavior will not get Sun anywhere, and only loosers behave like this, because they have no other chance for a success.
For those of you not familiar with Smalltalk, it is the grand-father all object oriented languages
.Net can be boiled down to a VM to make it easier for some people to understand after years of making them understand Java).
Except Simula, which created the idea of the class and heavily influenced the developers of Smalltalk. Then we got C++ (after Smalltalk, of course), and the ease of transition from C to C++ pretty much buried everything else for serious (except in some niches where specialized languages filled the role) object-oriented programming. C++ (and C) survive quite well today despite numerous extensions, precisely because they were turned over to standards bodies, so anyone that wanted their software to be easily ported to multiple platforms could write to the standard and avoid the extensions. The only thing really preventing you from making compile-once-run-anywhere programs in C++ is the difference between the platforms (which is why Java runs on a VM, and why
-PainKilleR-[CE]
According to repeated surveys of job adverts over the last 3 years Java is the 2nd most popular programming language after C++ and occasionally it has ranked above C++. Visual Basic generally ranks as 3rd most popular language in these surveys. I run a web site aimed at Java Programmer Certification (http://www.jchq.net) and it gets many tens of thousands of page requests per week. Reports of the death of Java have been somewhat exaggerated.
Java never had serious incompatability problems on the client side - Java's windowing toolkit AWT did. AWT was not written in Java. It was a huge (relative to Java) chunk of C code that stuffered from all of the incompatabilities and portability problems that C programs do in addition to the uncharted territory of trying to provide a cross platform GUI environment using native widgets.
The Java VM is, of course, a C program - but it is a tiny one. Almost all of the core Java libraries are written in Java itself, leveraging only very low level facilities. (Crypto is done in java, DNS is done in Java, etc.)
Swing, Java's pure Java GUI toolkit, is arguably the most modern, powerful , and portable GUI environment that exists right now. It is portable because it relies on only low level AWT facilities (simpe graphics areas and basic input) and then builds on top of that in pure Java.
At the time java was to first ship with Netscape, Sun had a pure Java version of the AWT toolkit. But Netscape apparently convinced them that native look and feel was more important than cross platform implementation. AWT - the buggy, non-portable, GUI C code - was thus hung around Java's neck.
If we'd had a pure Java GUI relying only on simple graphics primitives we could have build arbitrary interfaces that worked - cross platform - from the beginning. They would have been slow at first, and then rapidly gotten better (as Swing has).
Netscape set Java up and Microsoft knocked it down for a while at least...
-- Pat Niemeyer,
Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates and the BeanShell Java scripting language.
Sun started the ISO process over 5 years ago in 1997,Sun's ISO Process
Then in 1999 the began to standardize in ECMA
The then withdrew their application later that year. Details
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.