Sun To Give StarOffice Java Flavor

ilovestuff writes "Sun Microsystems is building a Java-based development kit for its StarOffice software to help corporate programmers customise desktop applications, a move that better pits it against Microsoft's dominant Office. The software development kit will be available in the middle of next year as part of a minor upgrade to the business version of Sun's StarOffice 6.0, said Joerg Heilig, director of engineering for StarOffice at Sun."

Comments

Re:Java blows

[stefanlasiewski]

Of course this is the price for writing code that work on windows, linux, mac, and random unix, so it is a tradeoff many accept.

I don't think it is. Perl, Python, and TCL all run under UNIX and Windows.

Yes, but all fo the cross-platform Perl, Python or TCL projects are very small. While these languages run on multiple platforms, they are still harder to port the Java. As a result, most cross-platform Perl, Python or TCL projects are much simpler then many of the Cross platform Java applications.

It was invented before Flash. It has Netscape's backing. And it still has less market penetration.

Er... apples and oranges. Flash is for fancy windows that run in your web browser, and it has Microsofts backing. Not much more to Flash.

Java is a whole universe of applications. You can have a flash-like applet, but that is only a very, very small part of the Java world; and you're right, most java applets suck (In large part because all versions Internet Explorer until 5.5 only supported Java 1.1, which was released five years ago). But nobody is defending Java applets.

The big part of Java is in the server market, where Java app servers like Weblogic, Websphere, Oracle 11i, Tomcat, or Dynamo have become the defacto standard in enterprise-level applications.

Re:Java?

[Randolpho]

SWT is more like AWT in that, rather than use actual JAVA code to draw things like windows, buttons, pulldown-menus, text fields, and the like, SWT (like AWT) will make a call to a native OS function that renders that widget for it.

SWT is different from AWT in that it does not try to adhere to the least-common-denominator principle -- is like Swing in that regard because it has more GUI widgets that can be added to the program.

SWT is unlike Swing, however, in that rather than using Java to draw the widget and listen for inputs, SWT merely tells the OS to do it for the program and handles anything the OS reports back. Because the code for handling that widget is optimized compiled code for the operating system, there is a massive net speedup in GUI interactivity.

SWT would probably be unnecessary if Sun would just put out a VM that handles the "power" of Java threads in a much better way.

.NET *Framework* is the JVM knockoff

[yerricde]

For all practical purposes ".NET" is basically the name that Microsoft is now associating with every latest version of most of its products, so it means nothing. (Yes, there is a very nice JVM ripoff in there somewhere...)

This JVM-inspired environment is called .NET Framework. Look for the word "Framework" in Microsoft .NET product literature to find references to what most Slashdot users seem to associate with ".NET".

C# fails

Some critics have described the Java language as "C++ done right". The C# language is Microsoft's re-hash of the Java language. Now if you stick two ++'s on top of each other, you get something that looks like a hash sign; thus, (C++)++ is C#.