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

I don't really care...

[ActiveSX]

...unless this will help me stay up longer so I can finish this paper that was due yesterday.

More viruses

[delfstrom]

Great, so now virus-writers will be able to create cross-platform office viruses.

Re:Java?

[bwt]

Java is a very nice OO language. Because of this, there is an extremely large body of existing class libraries that have names that are often abbreviated to acronyms. If you think the "learning curve" is too big, then by all means, use another language and start from scatch.

Java's slowness is often maligned, but java actually stacks up pretty well if you look at objective benchmarks. In Bagley's Language Shootout, java was 9th of 30 languages tested on linux. It does use a lot of memory, but only because of the overhead associated with the JVM runtime. 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. If this really bothers you, get a native java compiler and then you'll have smaller footprints but no portability.

I use several java apps on my P2 300, so I think you are exagerating. Odds are that you don't have much memory and that is what is slowing you down.

Java can only be considered a failure
Really? Java was invented a few years ago. There are now more jobs programming java than any other language. I really don't see how that is a failure.

Java scripting language?

[jsse]

Sun's StarOffice division intends to make Java a scripting language for StarOffice,...

A word processor running scripting language? Doesn't that sound so familiar to everyone?

which will help customers take advantage of Java's security features. Java's security model works by limiting the areas of the computer the code can manipulate.

Fortunately, smart people can learn from mistakes of the other and built it with security in mind from the ground up.

but it doesn't stop the creative minds of programmers.....

Scripting language for StarOffice!

[jsse]

Sun's StarOffice division intends to make Java a scripting language for StarOffice

Great, let's call it Javascript.

Re:Scripting language for StarOffice!

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, let's call it Javascript.

JavaScript was horribly named by inept marketers at Netscape back in 1995. Its real name was "LiveScript" but they changed it at the last minute so they could coast on Java hype. It has nothing to do with Java and the name has been confusing people ever since. And "JavaScript" was a good name, too. It would be nice if BeanShell, for example, could be called "JavaScript" because that's actually what BeanShell is.

It's like the .NET debacle at Microsoft. Every single marketing manager decided that his own projects needed to be part of the .NET initiative. They all hopped on it and diluted its meaning. 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, if you can find it without getting lost in the slick glossy .NET bullshit.)

IMHO if it's obvious that a programming language has been named by a marketer, that's a red flag. Java and C# were named by marketers. But at least nobody will confuse Java with coffee; that would be silly. But "C#" is as bad a name as "JavaScript". It's going to cause confusion with C and C++ (which are already confused for one another, and with Objective C, especially when HR managers scan people's resumes looking for keywords). And C# is nothing like C, or C++, or Objective C. I have to admit "C++" was a clever way to name a programming language that aspires to be (almost) a superset of C. But in that case the new name was a legal expression in the old one, it was a short, extremely descriptive name, and it made sense. C# fails on all three counts. They should have just named it "Me Too C".

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.

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?

[silvaran]

Oh yeah? Well beat this!

# cat fib.sh
fib() {
n=$1
if [ "$n" -lt "2" ]; then
echo -n "1"
else
first=$(fib $((n-1)))
second=$(fib $((n-2)))
echo -n $((first+second))
fi
}

fib $1

# time ./fib.sh 40
(it's been 10 minutes and I'm still waiting...)

Re:Java?

[AJWM]

It's big and slow.

In some cases, it's faster than C++.

Don't believe me? Download the Markov examples from Kernighan & Pike's "The Practise of Programming" and time the C++ and Java examples. On a P3-550 I get 3.63 seconds for the C++ and 2.90 seconds for the Java version.

Re:Java?

[AJWM]

Which shows how lousy C is at recursive functions. (And how bad recursive calls can be in general).

Rewriting fib(int n) along the lines of

int fastfib(int n)
{
int i;
int f = 0;
int fm1 = 1;
int fm2 = 1;

if (n < 2) return 1;
for (i = 2; i <= n; i++) {
f = fm1 + fm2;
fm2 = fm1;
fm1 = f;
}
return f;
}

(and similar in Java), I get times of 0.004 seconds for C and 0.567 seconds for Java -- most of which is the time to load the JVM (ie the difference between 'time java fastfib 40' and 'time java fastfib 0' is lost in the noise).

Proving that choice of algorithm can make far more difference than choice of programming language.

Re:Java blows

[bwt]

I don't think it is. Perl, Python, and TCL all run under UNIX and Windows. Hell, they're even compiled at runtime. And somehow they still use much less CPU and memory.

All of the languages you just named are slower than Java. This is common knowledge, but if you need proof, go to Bagley's language shootout. I think you should check your facts instead of making them up.

Don't get me wrong, I like Perl and Python and have used each of them for various tasks. Python's java implementation Jython is quite a nice way to fully mix java and python. I also like Ruby which you didn't mention.

I have 128M of memory. If that's not enough, then that's ridiculous. XNap, a Java napster client, takes ~20 seconds to start up. Java applets in Netscape take 15-30 seconds to start. Oh, and Sun's java plugin likes to crash Mozilla constantly, so I don't even bother enabling it in the first place.

I just downloaded XNap to have a look. I got the splash screen in 6 seconds on my P2 300 with 384 MB. I've never had mozilla 1.1 crash on me, and I often play a java/jython net game called wyvern that is a graphical 2D mud with real time combat.

I think you would do well to get more memory. No amound of memeory is "enough" -- memory always makes things go faster by avoiding swapping, especially if you like to have a lot of apps open at once.

And they're all boring enterprise level applications. While you may consider that a success, Java didn't change anything. Had it never been invented, though would have been written just the same, in C++.


Enterprise applications are boring, huh. I think that says a lot about the your perspective.

Most of those apps are likely written so poorly they only run on Windows anyway. I've heard Java's cross platformness is mostly a myth.

I think it is becoming clear that you are making assertions based on hearsay. My experience is exactly the opposite. In fact, it sounds more like you are describing VB than Java. Java's strongest point is that it really does steer you towards good programming practices. That was the biggest selling point for enterprise development, and the main reason C++ was mostly abandoned for enterprise apps.

Most of the hard parts of enterprise apps in java are written by specialists and offered to the world to reuse. Take a look at the Apache Jakarta project. The open source tools there are the driving force behind most of the enterprise apps out there.

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

Huh? I'll wait for the citation on that amazing claim. But in the meantime, go and do a job posting count at monster.com by keyword. I did and the results were as follows:
flash 652
java 3518
Frankly, flash is about to find itself completely outdated when SVG takes over.