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Sun's "Java Powered" Campaign
scapermoya writes "eWeek is reporting that Sun has started blitzing consumers , trying to increase public awareness about Java, with everything from accosting pedestrians to "Java Powered" logos begining to appear on some devices that are J2ME (Java 2 Media Edition) compatable. Tiny cup logos will now be pasted on everything from cell phones to microwaves." But not on Space Invaders clones.
Well Microsoft - or better: the vendors do this with every nearly every x86, printer, mouse, soundcard, usb stick, external harddrive.... nerly every piece of hardware sold today. I'm waiting for a tux- and an apple-sticker (sometimes you can see the "finder-face" on certified compatible hardware (like I already saw on some newer laserprintes)
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
It's called brand awareness. The point here is to make sure that people (and in the case of mobile phones, young people) equate "Java" with "cool games" and an "i need it" attitude. In the end this will (hopefully) mean that in order to be able to sell a phone, you need to support Java. In turn, this means that MS will have a that much harder time trying to get everyone to use the mobile version of .NET.
In fact, here in europe we see this happening already. Every new phone that comes out has J2ME support, and when a phone doesn't have it is reviewed, it's always mentioned as a big minus point.
I suppose (hope) we'll see the same thing happen in the US.
By the way, didn't the latest MS "smartphones" have J2ME support these days?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Extremely fast pace may be a slight overstatement however I would say there are many languages that are taking developers away from Java not just C#. An example of this is how all the students at the local Universities are petitioning to have Java removed as the core programming language as they are complaining that is just not applicable enough compared to other languages such as C#. By no means am I saying these concerns are legitimate but Java is definitely being hit hard lately. Furthermore, I do a lot of freelance work in Toronto for different companies and most of the ones that were using Java a year ago are now switching to the .NET platform. I could not say for the rest of the world but here in Canada Java is being hit hard and the majority of companies, at least that I have dealt with, are switching to .NET to get rid of Java all together. Not saying this is good or bad however I think it's clear, at least in Toronto, that Java is having a hard time keeping up and keeping developers on board.
They would do well to start with developer awareness...I was bemused that while I could find lots of phones touting "support for java games" - I couldn't find satisfactory documentation on what this means. I've no interest in games per-se, however given a blue-tooth phone with support for Java - I am interested in business applications. I want to find out if I can use blue-tooth phones in cryptographic authentication systems; I want to know what APIs are available to allow my phone to run bespoke messaging software. Hell - I'd like to see a sample application which amounts to more than a trivial waste of time. I can't help thinking that this technology holds the key to interesting new systems... but that won't happen if Java is just a buzzword denoting a more expensive toy.
ok, I usually stay out of the BS on threads such as this, but you are too much of a moron for me to hold my tongue. I can't really argue too much with your comments about Java client applications - I have seen my share of sluggish java apps. As far as the clunky user interfaces, that would be the result of an interface that is poorly planned and hardly a problem with the language itself.
Now, as far as Java running on an application server: J2EE isn't that complicated, if you had any real experience with it, you would know that. You statement about abominable database access methods is laughable - It doesn't get much simpler than JDBC. If you don't know what you are talking about, I would suggest that you stay out of the discussion.
JDBC isn't the problem. (Although, it's still a tedious way to write database access procedures.) EJBs, container-managed persistence, and the like are the problem. And, better yet, the Java code to database access is so tedious that I've watched Java developers write code that's O(n!) just to avoid writing code to deal with another query or stored procedure.
Java Powered: Buggy, slow, and late.
The University of Toronto is a big name in the field of AI, particularly logical reasoning and cognitive robotics. They've put out a lot of papers and software, and are responsible for the Golog language. Considering that these technologies may very well end up in the semantic web, among other future widespread technologies, it might be a bad idea to ignore what's going on over there. Corporate adoption dictates what the current trend is, but educational adoption predicts what the trend will be in the next decade or two.
EJBs are an option that doesn't have to be used and CMPs are often not used even if the app utilizes EJBs. EJB has it's place, but it is not the only option available to the developer. As far as being tedious, there is no way to get around having to write a query to access data. If a developer isn't using a class to generate db connections for them, then it's their own fault if they choose to make things more tedious than they need to be.
I don't know what other people's experiences are with 'java-powered' products, but every complex application I've seen rolled out has problems far bigger than the problems solved. Worse, JAVA has yet to live up to its original claims.
1) Write once run anywhere. I've yet to see this true of any complex app. It's problably been done, though. I just haven't seen it done.
2) Compatibility problems. I install one version of the run-time environment for a must-have client app, and the rest break. It can be fixed, but it should never have happened in the first place.
3) For reasons unclear, large java apps seem to suffer from some kind of fragmented UI design illness. Functions that logically belong together end up in totally different places. Its not true for all, but seems to be more frequent amongst complex java products than similar non-java apps. This, admittedly, is probably due to the fact that I usually am using network analysis and managment tools.
4) Massive speed inconsistencies. Onde PC will run a client just fine, and different PC will barely run it at all. It can be fixed, but I've got better things to do with my time than fix Sun's problems.
All in all, what often happens is that I end up using non-java powered solutions, just because they work. I could spend the extra time to fix all the java issues, but it just never seems worth the time and effort.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Consumers don't care what language there application is written in as long as it does what is requested.
./application instead of /full/path/applicaton. Other webinstallers have failed in random places (again with complete tracebacks!). I've had certain versions of matlab that failed to start over remote X sessions because of jvm versions. A student I work with is doing a project in Java and he's still having problems in certain browsers, etc.
.NET.
Well, not to flame but in my experience java sucks, and always has sucked. Forturnately, the marketing people at Sun have convinced them to follow the Solaris versioning and jump from 1.4 to 5.
I guess I have to be more specific with its suckiness. Back when java was newer Netscape on Linux + Java = long lag & loadtime, then crash. This was back when Java was pushed as _the_ GUI app, because you could "Write once, run anywhere". Then the awt toolkit was not as crossplatform as hoped, then came swing, and then people stopped writing GUIs for java (for the most part). Then a little later, I was tasked to install Oracle on an NT box (or some other MS server, don't remember). It was the Java "Universal installer". It randomly hung, and just didn't work. Later I found out that I had to reboot the machine in 16 colors so the java installer would install. Then Sun ships things with their "webinstaller", which is actually the "javainstaller", but the marketing people were on vaction during that naming process. Anyhow, I've seen these guys fail to start if you launched them with the full path (complete with a traceback with linenumbers, etc, w00t!). Of course, it could find the classpaths if I ran it with
These are all off the top of my head.
Again, I'm not flaming, just stating my obvservations. I've programmed and run some java stuff on very small embedded systems like smartcards and iButtons with no real issues, but these were just toy projects that did not go into production.
Now java seems most happy as a middleware language (application services or whatnot) on 3 tier web services, and having competition from
Also, it has become the marketing puppet for Sun. Java desktop, Java this, java that.
So yeah, as far as _this_ consumer goes, I care, and loathe running anything that is java.
Actually, J2ME is not a proper subset of J2SE. For example, there are no javax.microedition packages in J2SE, where there is in J2ME. Furthermore, which J2ME? There's CLDC, which is in the cell phones for example, and there's CDC which is in set top boxes, etc. While J2ME mostly is a subset of J2SE, it's also J2SE with lots of cruft and deprecated methods removed.
This site has decent pictures. Big Java logo near the cockpit, and a big Sun logo on the tail. Before and after. Ouch!
An example of this is how all the students at the local Universities are petitioning to have Java removed as the core programming language as they are complaining that is just not applicable enough compared to other languages such as C#.
.NET or MS users group until Microsoft actually PAID some students to start one! Now they are always have events sponsored by MS and bringing in new books paid for by MS to the library or just doing various pro-MS propoganda.
.NET user groups! That's like prostitution and shame on the student whores who work with MS on this!
Beware the Astroturf of Microsoft on campus!
My school never had anyone intrested in a
Now I'm not bitching about extra C# books in the library...what I am bitching about is Microsoft paying students to do things like "petition for the removal of outdated languages like Java from the curriculum".
MS couldn't keep up with real grassroots Linux and BSD groups on campus so they actually had to PAY for students to create MS and
Heheh....look at all the job stats and you'll see Java burying every other language out there in terms of actual demand. I go where the money is, and Java is it - not c-sharp, not php, not whatever.
You guys just keep on burying your head in the sand, since Java right now is probably the most widely deployed language in IT history, what with the new cars (BMWs), smartcards, SIM cards, mobilke cellphones, server apps, desktop apps runniung Java.
I KNOW i'll have a job 5-10 years from now doing Java when you guys are trying to learn the next new language from Microsoft or whomever.
Well, really, once the jvm is compiled, assembled, and linked so that it may be executed, it's just machine code. The original language used to implement it doesn't matter, ie. it's transparent.
... Sad indeed.
However, I for one would love to see "pwn3d by C" on the side of my microwave.
It'd be sad though if we started seeing stuff like, "Powered by VB!"
it'd be funny, you be able to tell who the real geeks are when they goto circuit city to buy something...
"null pointers dereferenced here" -sluts of C
.. in a gallaxy far away there exited a company called Netscape. In addition to their famous web browser, they made various server products (the web server, application server, directory server, etc) for the enterpise. Eventually, their marketing droids have mis-managed the Netscape brand name (and the company web site) to the point where they had to rename their server division and all their server products into "iPlanet". Then they got transferred to Sun, and Sun decided to use the "Sun ONE" brand name for all of this ex-netscape stuff. Now it looks like they are willing to sacrifice this perfectly fine brand name and to confuse their customers even further by renaming their SunONE product line into SunJAVA product line. At this point this is getting really silly now that you suddenly have products like "SunJAVA Directory server" which have little to do with the Java language other than their terrible admin tools are written in Java (we have decided to dump the SunONE DS in favor of OpenLDAP becaususe of SunONE's terrible Java-based admin interface and the lack of proper documentation for CLI tools even though it comes free with Solaris). In the past they also had to rename their OS (SunOS -> Solaris), to rename their compiler suite MULTIPLE time, and to change the versioning scheme for Solaris and Java. Way to go Sun! I am sure they'll rename this whole SunJAVA product line again in a couple of years. When a company feels so insecure about its brands and renames its products so often, many people including me generally see it as a sign of weakness, and not as an improvement.