EIOffice 2004 vs. MS Office 2003

ryen writes "Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore able to run on both Windows and Linux. EIOffice 2004 offers features which should get a few users' attention, but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office? Flexbeta has the review." That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.

Comments

Re:It looks interesting

[cyfer2000]

download

A chinese page, click the links in the table.

you won't believe it is a Java software.

Re:Both Platforms? WOW!

[Wavicle]

I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but...

well, you see, Java really isn't that portable.

I have worked since 1998 on Java software with a focus on UI and portability. Although OS X has never been on my radar, I have worked extensively on other people's code when it was "working fine in windows" but partially or completely broken in Solaris (later Linux as servers migrating over).

All the compatibility problems broke down to one of three problems:

1) Solaris patching. I don't know if Sun has fixed this, but patching of Solaris and patching of Java to work on Solaris was a true nightmare. The Solaris JVM was awful (was, I haven't touched it since 1.3 so I like to think it is all better now).

2) Hardcoding of directory separator characters instead of using File.separatorChar

3) Fonts. The UI issues on the Unix variants for early Java were huge. Swing didn't hardly fix anything because the underlying problem was truly hideous fonts. To the best of my knowledge, 1.4 has completely fixed this problem.

To the best of my knowledge #1 and #3 are fixed now. #2 is something you usually only see from recent grads or people new to Java programming.

I can't remember the last time anything I wrote in Java and packaged as a jar had trouble working in Windows or Linux. Certainly has not happened since 1.4 came out.

I've worked recently with C/C++ code and experienced C/C++ portability fun between platforms. The code was used for reading a writing DNA chromatogram format files. Worked perfectly in Solaris. Wrote out 4 gigabyte blank files in Linux in the odd circumstance when it would actually run at all. The problem turned out to be endian handling. This problem doesn't occur in Java, however in C/C++ when you simply tell the machine to write out blocks of memory (that happen to be data structures) the resulting byte order is whatever the machine natively uses. The IO routines don't know if one piece is a double, another a long and yet another a short.

Java is really portable. It's also quite fast. Nearly all complaints about Java's speed these days come from Swing, which is really caused by an overdesign of Swing (from a design stand point, Swing is very, very nice. Unfortunately what makes it nice also makes it quite slow)