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?

[Daleks]

It's big and slow. Very big. Very slow. Java apps/applets aren't usable on my P2 266

Java is good at some things, worse at others. Look at the following for instance:

[MyMachine:~] mylogin% uname -a
Darwin Roadrunner.local. 6.2 Darwin Kernel Version 6.2: Tue Nov 5 22:00:03 PST 2002; root:xnu/xnu-344.12.2.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
[MyMachine:~] mylogin% gcc -v
Reading specs from /usr/libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc/3.1/specs
Thread model: posix
Apple Computer, Inc. GCC version 1161, based on gcc version 3.1 20020420 (prerelease)
[MyMachine:~] mylogin% cat fib.c
#include <stdio.h>

int fib(int n)
{
if (n < 2) return 1;
else return fib(n-1)+fib(n-2);
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
printf("%d\n", fib(atoi(argv[1])));

return 0;
}
[MyMachine:~] mylogin% gcc fib.c -O3 -o fib
[MyMachine:~] mylogin% time ./fib 40
165580141

real 0m9.828s
user 0m9.660s
sys 0m0.020s

And now for Java:

[MyMachine:~] mylogin% java -version
java version "1.4.1-alpha"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1-alpha-root_22_nov_2002_19_03)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_alpha-7-release, mixed mode)*
[MyMachine:~] mylogin% cat fib.java

public class fib
{
public static int fib(int n)
{
if (n < 2) return 1;
else return fib(n-1)+fib(n-2);
}

public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println(fib(Integer.parseInt(args[0]))) ;
}
}
[MyMachine:~] mylogin% javac fib.java
[MyMachine:~] mylogin% time java -server fib 40
165580141

real 0m7.867s
user 0m7.640s
sys 0m0.150s

The results get even more interesting as you compute higher and higher numbers of the Fibonacci sequence. When computing the 43rd Fibonacci number the java bytecode beats the statically compiled C machinecode by a full 10 seconds. For the 44th number it beats it be 19 seconds.

Does this mean that java bytecode is faster than machinecode in all cases? No. Does the fact that a few java applets on your P2 run poorly mean java itself is slow? No. It is true that Java has poor performance in the GUI realm, but it is great for backend server applications. So making the blanket statement that java is slow or fast in general based on a single or handful of benchmarks is just plain wrong.

* I'm not running some special optimized pre-release version of Apple's JVM. It's the pre-release 1.4.1 implementation. Nothing that isn't available on Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc.