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

More viruses

[delfstrom]

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

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: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.