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Oracle and Sun Team Up to Provide .NET Alternative
segphault writes "Ars Technica has an article about the new partnership between Sun and Oracle, designed to provide an alternative to .NET." From the article: "According to Ellison and McNealy, their mutual goal is the production of a complete Java-centric enterprise datacenter architecture that leverages Solaris 10 and Oracle's Fusion middleware. Designed specifically as an alternative to Microsoft's .NET technology stack, the new platform is competitively priced and based on robust frameworks."
As is their AIM methodology.
In fact, Oracle Apps downloads are unsigned, untrusted. You have to open the browser (and it must be IE) pretty dern wide to use it.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
"the new platform is competitively priced"
.NET wouldn't go amiss, but what's the point? Sufficient technologies already exist out there to do what they're trumpeting as new...
What!? I remember when Oracle and Sun charging was based on how much money fell out your pockets when they turned you upside down and shook you.
Seriously though, an alternative is nice, but isn't that alternative already here and called Java? I suppose a nice end-to-end branding a-la
If it isn't a resource hog.
.Net
Hopefully they'd put some effort into making sure it is at least as secure as
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
/dev/random
I don't see the Oracle solution being cheap... But who knows!
yes, but EJB was designed by a committee and turned out to be a complete misfire.
.net does not have an equivalent to EJB - just doesn't exist
that hasn't stopped people from using EJB, though, and for some even liking it - remember that ignorance is bliss
people have used it because they were told that it was the right thing to do
however, in doing so, they have suffered serious productivity losses
if you notice,
why is this? IT REALLY IS AN UNNECESSARY TECHNOLOGY! for many reasons.
and if you look at EJB 3.0, it is so completely different than EJB 2.0, it would be hard to compare them
why, you may ask - EJB was done by a committee lead by IBM and Sun, with less than knowledgable engineers.
this is NOT a troll - i know this for a fact, have spoken to them,
and have heard them admit it was a mistake.
as you can tell, i have an issue with EJB or any crap technology 'standard' that is delivered to the general public as the right thing to do.
"According to Ellison, this is all about providing users and developers with technology based on standards. But what standards is he talking about, and are those the standards that consumers care about? The availability of an open source .NET implementation based on ECMA standards certainly makes Java look more proprietary."
.NET has been proposed to the ECMA, which is not even a standard organization. Mono provides only a small subset of .NET.
The whole JDK1.5 API is public and totaly available to be implemented by anyone (www.jcp.org). Also there is already a 98%-complete implementation of it (www.classpath.org). OTOH, only a small part of
(that said, the most used Java Platform (Sun) is still proprietary)
Million Dollar Screenshot
As a sysadmin, I work with a plethora of applications, systems, integrators and vendors. We run everything: AS400, PHP, J2EE, linux, windows, perl, oracle, db2, postgres, mysql...I could go on, and on. Windows bashing aside, Java is the only technology that's "advanced" enough to break itself. I can literally run some of my perl scripts over and over until the cows come home...or leave my cisco routers up for 700 days...or reboot linux til I'm blue in the face and it's always predictable. When they fail, there's some reason: Disk space, upgraded software, user error, low memory, gamma rays, etc. Java is not that way - java has a mind of its own doesn't need an excuse to not work 1/1000 times.
My point here is that I feel for the people who will be administering this system - all of those sleepless nights troubleshooting transient failures with no fixes or even causes. Oh well, they made their bed, I suppose.
...is the sincerest form of flattery.
Rather than teaming with Larry Elliscum, a better move for Sun would be to open Java up to the ECMA/ISO for standardization.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
i for one am sick of dealing with classpaths and 250 jars inside of jar files inside of war files inside of ear files - catch my drift.
.net has, and something like a GAC.
.net after 6 years of dealing with Sun's bullcrap and i have never looked back.
i'm also sick of J2EE containers with class loaders schemes that are more complicated than my senior year algebraic structures course.
build a linker into java just like
than allow versioning of libraries.
then get rid of checked exceptions so i don't have to do try/catch/wrap/rethrows(or do nothing) in 90% of my J2EE code.
then get rid of stateful, local session beans - how redudant is that???
then find a way to get rid of the 14 million defines i need in my server.xml to specify which implementation of each 'open, standard' interface i need
so, java as a language - it's ok
java as a platform - SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
left java for
No? Why would I be interested in another .NET lock-in project. Open would be news, but this just sounds like more crap to tag onto my tech budget that could be done with any number of existing technologies.
Quack, quack.
Oh but you see J2EE, Java, Eclipse, etc. - they're not obliterating .NET and Microsoft like Sun would have hoped. So instead of beefing up their offerings and maybe fixing whatever is keeping them from "taking down" Microsoft and .NET they're going to do something "new" - because otherwise, they'd have to explain why J2EE didn't do it.
Schnapple
So I'm supposed to trade a solution written by a company with a maniacal leader for a solution written by TWO companies with maniacal leaders? No thanks.
The reason I ask is that most people seem to use the Java front-end or the HTML front-end. I haven't seen people use ActiveX at all with eBusiness Suite or Oracle database....
Just checking the install that I have... yup that just uses Java as well.
I can't find ActiveX anywhere on the various Oracle products I've got installed at the moment.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
So the world's largest database vendor is paring up with the world's largest big server provider as competition to Windows and
Sounds like Microsoft joining up with Dell to compete with Apple on the desktop.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
ROTLMAO..The last time Sun took on MS they WON. Or have you not been around long enough to remember the Java battle? The part I don't get is the Oracle Middleware, Sun has a whole set of Java Services that can function as middleware and even integrate with .NET to provide Web Services. This seems to be taking money away from Sun's software group.
Y'know, I was just saying to myself, "Self," I said to myself, "you really need an enterprise datacenter architecture that leverages middleware based on robust frameworks." Wow, they must have been reading my mind!
Find free books.
Lets hope this means they're going to do something about J2EE. Between Enterprise Java Beans and Java Server Faces, J2EE is a sordid mess right now.
Maybe it would fit in on the development tool side of things if it weren't for the fact that Sun has nothing to do with Eclipse, it's IBM's baby. Even Sun's notoriously stupid marketing department wouldn't call a Sun product 'Eclipse'. And given that name, Sun are unlikely to ever get involved even if they wanted to (which they don't). Expect to see Sun pushing the improving NetBeans platform as part of this offering.
Suck figs.
But AIM is still ActiveX so the original point halfway stands.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
i wouldn't root for sun.
they've attempted man times with much fanfare to unleash some new technology onto the market - usually with a resounding dud (java chips, jini, jxta, java desktop to unseat MS)
their latest concept of utility computing is based on the assumption that the evolution of computing will mirror the evolution of power grids in civilized countries.
their open sourcing of their flagship product, solaris, smacks of desperation, when confronted with the linux/dell threat.
the new java enterprise system seems pretty weak - how many developers do you know who have downloaded the newly openned source code yet?
java as a platform is moving slower than a snail.
i met with once with one of the j2ee managers, and his explanation for their slow evolution of java was its 'industrial inertia'.
they shipped the J2EE/Java 2 combo before it was complete, and promise backwards compatibility back to Java 1.0, so the platform is being deprived of necessary upgrades in order to maintain compatibility with previous versions.
so, at this point, as sun's market valuation decreases, their relevance does too.
they are beginning to take desperate measures, and this may include seeding the market with inferior, but ridiculously cheap technology in order to fend off competition.
this is in leiu of high quality technology which requires more time and money than Sun has.
they were backed into a corner, and they failed to find a way out.
it's a shame, because they once had the time, money, marketshare to do anything they wanted.
they just kept playing the same ridiculous hand.
BTW - recall how Java was created.
Jim Gosling was going to quit Sun because he felt they lost their ability to build software, so Scott M. spun off JavaSoft.
Again, Sun lost it a long time ago.
So now Sun is taking on .NET and they're teaming up with Oracle for it ? What a load of nonsense. According to Sun themselves the whole partnership is almost entirely based on Oracle choosing Solaris 10 as their preferred platform. You can read more about that here.
.NET, and if you take the effort to skim the Sun news articles I'm sure you'd conclude the same. What about this: Linux with either MySQL or Postgres vs. Solaris 10 with Oracle, or MySQL/Postgres if you so prefer. And all based on almost the same price / options.
IMO some "reporters" only read what they want to read. Sun already has Java and it has got quite a big foothold to last. Solaris 10 is also kicking some serious ass. Why on earth would they want to directly confront a company like MS when they can easily expand their own market and slowly strengthen their position ? IMVHO the big competitor for Sun is Linux at this time. Something clearly displayed when looking at Novell which almost immediatly started "OpenSuSE" after the release of OpenSolaris. Coincedence? I wonder...
This step has IMO nothing to do with
Utopia? Then why is Oracle also jumping on the "opening up some products" bandwagon ?
No, I don't think MS has much to worry, Sun is targeting another audience here.
I actually laughed out loud, but after about a second I realized you were serious.
I admit, it is a little unclear how a product can be a 'datacenter platform' and also a '.NET competitor', given that the two things hardly overlap at all.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was really a set of Java wrappers for Oracle Fusion, bundled up for Solaris 10 to create a one-step solution for getting a datacenter going. The weakness of such a product would, of course, be that it has Fusion
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it unnecessary, more like, it set out to solve problems that were bigger, or at least different, than the problems people had to actually solve most of the time.
As for the knowledgeability of the engineers, I've found that it's an easy temptation to fall into as a developer to think that you're smarter than everybody else (can't they see how much better your idea is than theirs?)
Requirements
Qualifications:
5+ years Java, J2EE
4+ years Microsoft Dot Net
4+ years Sun Dot Java
3+ Internet Explorer Programming
** Attention to detail
** Likes to work on mulitple projects simultaneously
** Excellent communication skills (written, verbal and other)
** Must be able to work 50+ hours per week
** Up to 90% travel
** No benefits!
i kinda kicks ass, actually
:-0
i can't believe they actually added lambda functions to the language!
for those of you who know lisp/scheme/xml, you might recognize some of the syntax
and someone even hooked up WMI as a provider.
someone else hooked up WinForms as a provider as well
and it sure beats EJB 3.0 Entity Beans
the alpha's a bit buggy though.
it's supposed to RTM with Orcas sometime late this year.
As I understand it EJB does some things very nice and transparent like distributed transactions.. I see programmers were i work that do not know wat distibuded transactions are and probebly just hope for the best but some aplications need things like that and all aplications are probebly better of doing the right thing.
Seriously, I doubt world needs yet another infrastructure (even assuming this one will be Java-based). The only thing that I see happening by this effort is further discrediting of the Java technology, which after all those years still cannot provide an enterprise infrastructure compelling to developers (the hodge-podge of Struts, Spring, JSF, etc. only makes things worse).
Last but not the least, let's go back to the basic question and ask ourselves "cui prodest?" I see what Sun has in it, yet I fail to see what benefits Oracle is supposed to realize for it. Oracle is not a player in this field. Speculation and rumors may fly high but it will be interesting to observe the real motives of Ellison in this case.
Or even 20 years ago. In fact I barely understand it now.
Mono is a more complete environment than any open source version of Java has ever managed - Miguel et al have done great things - now even commercial products like imeem are using it for their data center and Unix ports.
Man, it seems everyone in the world is trying to make alternatives to Microsoft's wares. First off, the above article does not explain how Java is going to somehow provide an alternative to .NET. Java has been around for a good 10 years and I don't how the involvment of Oracle is going to magically revive the language. .NET has been around for less than half that, and already is taking over Java. Why?
.NET, alternative they should be focusing on an easy to use and powerful development environment. The Java language is powerful enough. Now it's time for a useful IDE.
Very few have managed to do is what Microsoft has done for years. Make software and software development easy to use! Ease of use for the computer user and just as importantly, ease of use for the developer. As a developer who has worked with C/C++ C#, VB and Java for years, I've found all but the Java language to have had a well designed and programmer friendly development environment. Java has tons of IDEs out there and they all pretty much suck.
Programmers are people and people are inherently lazy. Lazy in the sence that people don't want to go out of the way if they don't have too. In programming terms, a good IDE can make all the difference. Microsoft doesn't always create the best technology but they make it friendly and thats why they sell. I've been waiting years for alternatives to Word, Access, Visual Studio, and Windows and I haven't seen it yet. In my opinion, if Sun and Oracle are going to try and make a
a bit harsh, probably.
.NET is only now planning to release a persistence framework, after literally thiking about it for 2 years, and it hasn't seemed to affect their market share.
:-)
but, they had this pie in the sky idea that EJB would become an enterprise component model for distributed computing.
Session beans were designed to be kind of a modern day CORBA implementation, in fact using IIOP as their wire level protocol.
Entity beans were designed to be a kind of coarse grained persistent component model.
And for 1999, it was a novell concept.
What people ended up trying to do with them is create web applications.
Entity beans were used, often poorly, as a general OR mapping system, which is a tough way to go.
Session beans were used occasionally for remoting, but mostly for either state tracking or state sharing.
Both Entity and Session beans are almost always used locally, hence their introduction of the Home interface.
EJB as an enterprise component model, where applications achieve this SOA style architecture never happened.
Internally, IBM product devisions agreed on EJB as a communications platforms for integrating their applications. This never happened.
IBM's push for this made the EJB specification process very political.
For example, IIOP was pushed as the wire level protocol so it would support legacy C++ CORBA implementations. However, I don't know of any J2EE application that communicates with a C++ CORBA app over IIOP. I'd love to hear if there are some out there.
I'm not saying I had a better solution at the time, but when it did come out (and I knew several people on the original EJB committee), I felt it would not achieve its goals.
My take on it then was XML on the wire, XML as an IDL, with pluggable transports. Yes, even in 1999, some of use were doing this!
But, this is basically what we see with SOAP/WSDL.
This has turned out to have it's own limiting issues, though.
Personally, I would have provided very minimalist interfaces for a lot of this. Then, I would have allowed someone else to take the arrows.
Heck,
And they took 6 years so far to build WCF (indigo).
In any case, 1 more interesting note.
I had the opportunity once to corner some of the J2EE leads and architects at day long private meeting at Sun.
Their response was basically apologetic, although the architects were really hung up on JDO. Marketing told us that they have devoted 99% of their efforts to Web Services.
Furthermore, we were told that the Java group is being put under the manager who really pushed Solaris to where it is now, and that in time Java/J2EE should being to improve.
I have a lot of interesting Sun/Microsoft stories, actually, but those are for another day
In astronomy class they said the sun wouldn't burn out for a few billion years. It looks like teacher was wrong. First of all .NET was the Java alternative. Sun has been inept at managing Java. .NET should never have been a serious alternative to Java. With .NET Microsoft looked at Java's shortcommings; and did a great job of answering those issues. All Sun needed to do was answer back in kind in the next release of Java. Yet here we are years later; and its only just now catching up.
Why should we expect this press release to amount to anything from Sun? They've been promising to turn it around in the next version now for 10 years; but they keep getting farther behind. 10 years ago I told my Sun sun rep their boxes were too expensive to buy and upgrade compared to Linux. It's ten years later and I could have the same talk with my rep today. The only thing left in my racks with the sun logo are some monster 64 cpu machines running (big suprise) a massive Oracle database.
point is that .NET and many other technologies can do distributed transactions without and EJBish thing.
actually, it is JTA/JTS that makes distributed transactions possible.
EJB just allows you to remote your transaction with remote invocations, which is very very rare.
Why exactly would that help? Right now the Java standards are open to input from a wide range of voices, from individual developers through open source communities like Apache to corporations like Oracle and IBM. No voice has overall control, no-one can force through self-serving capabilities and everyone gets to use the specifications royalty free. All of them know their contributions can be implemented as open source yet that the market in which they operate can't be monopolised by any single company.
Sun started ECMA standardisation and then realised half-way through the process that it was going to produce the worst of all worlds; a rubber-stamp for the work Sun had done, with no input from any communities and a freezing of the specs by the ECMA dinosaur, combined with a loss of the ability to enforce the Java trademark and an inevitable embrace-and-extend by companies like Microsoft and IBM. Sun should have worked this out before starting with ECMA but fortunately realised in time and pulled out of the process. The result was the creation of the JCP and the most open, competitive software market the computer industry has yet seen.
Microsoft fully understands the PR value of ECMA and is cynically using it to rubber stamp it's Office 12 XML format to undermine the openness of OpenDocument. That action has done us the good service of showing us just how intellectually bankrupt ECMA actually is. What the Java platform needs is not the destruction ECMA would bring, but rather the further evolution of the JCP, which is working better than pretty much any standards body before it and is only hampered by the public perception of Sun control.
Read the source (article), Luke!
According to the article linked to by arsdigita, this is not about .NET at all, but about SAP. It looks to me like Oracle is actively porting its middleware to Java in order to claim that they are easier to develop for and less proprietary than SAP's counterparts. Sun and Oracle will promote each other's non-competing products as a part of this deal.
Concerning that... I have a few questions and maybe someone here might want to help me by bashing/hyping something.
I'm a CS student (still doing the foundation courses) and one of my courses is a one-year software project. We have to design and implement a replacement for an online bibliography. As the CS department is somewhat Java-centric we have to do it with JSP (or pure servlets, if we dislike JSP for some reason). That by itself is not much of a problem, although Java might be a bit heavy for a site getting about twenty unique hits per day... What bugs me is that we're forced to use MySQL; alternative databases like Postgre are not allowed for some reason. If you want to tell me how exactly this is going to make my life worse, feel free to do so (this is the bashing part).
For example, does MySQL support a transaction log? I thought something like this might be useful in case Bad Things(TM) happen to the database (support for it wouldd also look nice on our feature list).
If you feel like hyping something, I'd appreciate it if you could enlighten me on frameworks which might be useful in the development of a web application. My main concern is reducing development time as that's the resource we have the least of.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
harsh, perhaps.
EJB had this pie in the sky concept of becoming a general purpose distributed enterprise component architecture, where applications could be integrated SOA style (before SOA was a term).
Internal IBM divisions saw this as a way to integrate their various applications.
None of this ever actually happened.
EJB Entity beans were meant to be coarse grained persistent distributed components.
Session beans were meant to be a means of remoting.
IIOP was adopted to integrate with legacy CORBA apps.
Hardly anyone uses EJB this way.
People use EJB these days mostly to build web applications.
Entity beans are used to do OR mapping, which is a tough way to go.
Session beans are used for state tracking and state sharing.
Most EJB invocations are local, hence the Home interface introduced in EJB 2.0.
In other words, its kind of like buying a house because you need lumber.
It was clear when the spec first came out that complexity and complex interdependencies would prevent the grand vision from happening.
My original take on it was that it wouldn't achieve the desired goal (and it hasn't).
In fact, back then, some of us were advocating XML on the wire and XML as an IDL. This is kind of what SOAP/WSDL became. But that has it's own issues.
In any case, I would have implemented a very minimal interface for J2EE and let someone else take the arrows.
MS took 2 years just to think about LINQ in C# 3.0 and over 6 years so far to build WCF!
And it hasn't seemed to hurt its market share so far.
I was at an all day private meeting once with Sun on J2EE.
I would summarize it as this - they promised to fix it over time, and to prove it told us that they put their Solaris dev manager in charge of Java.
This caused some rifts in Sun, but they were getting beat up too much over Java/J2EE's immaturity.
So, they gave it to one of their most accomplished dev managers.
But with ejb you do not need to know.I must admit i like spring a lot more than ejb. Often real inovation does not come from the real big guys the are to bussy inventing acronyms.
to some degree, there was some cross over of personnel between the divison of IBM spearheading EJB and Sun Microsystems.
some of the people on either team went way back
i think that had at least something to do with it
IBM was also threatening to start up their own version of Java at the same time.
Sun didn't want to see Java move in 2 different directions, and J2EE became a way of gluing it together for a longer haul.
however, you are beginning to now see another push to split java into an open source version and a sun version.
so, sun will have to do something again.
After spending part of 2005 writing an app in Java, I must say, I don't really like it. I started out very excited about eclipse, and hibernate, and I wrote a huge pile of code, and got many things working quickly. But in the end, I didn't feel like I had much control. The ability to tune and analyze performance was not really there. Furthermore, the whole community of Java-heads seem to be "performance, not a problem". My problem domain involves large data sets (~ 1 GB in ram or more), so I really couldn't go with this general outlook. It's not that Java performance isn't a problem, most people doing Java tend to do heavily SQL/IO bound apps, so most of the advice I got or read was along the lines of "create an index" and so on. Getting information on what the VM is doing in Java is a little difficult, even though in theory its all there, and Sun should be providing really cool tools to see what your app is doing.
Of course I wasn't prepared to buy the very expensive performance tools, but if I had, maybe I'd feel better.
I'm moving onto C++/Python and erlang. See ya later Java.
you still have to demarkate your transactions, just as with .net
but, yes, spring and hibernate started with a focus on OR mapping.
EJB entity beans were kind of meant for something else originally, that's why they don't quite do the trick.
I was told that Entity beans were meant to be a 'coarse grained distributed persistent component' with few, if any, relationships.
This becomes apparent when you try to use them.
EJB 3.0 is actually sort of based on hibernate.
Seriously, I don't see this as anything more than Ellison's continued attempts to have a shot at Bill Gates - this has zero to do with technology, it's one man's grudge match gone awry. As for an alternative to .Net? How backwards can you get? Why not support Mono, and help build the best of all worlds - a fully cross platform implementation of .Net with incredibly rich development tools (VS2005) running across all the major platforms?
I.
What an interesting comparison.
Does that imply that the Empire will be divided, say, an OS in the West, and an Office suite in the East, and the East hang around for another thousand years after the FOSSian hordes have crossed the Columbia to re-partition the buggy carcass of the West?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Sun can die for all I care, and allying with Oracle will probably help them down that path.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
.NET is not just about enterprise datacenter, but mainly about the next generation of client software. .NET has had little impact in the 'enterprise datacenter'. The only place where it is truly successful is client software. .NET is at the core of the windows vista API. So in order for sun to compete with .NET, they would have to improve the client side support, e.g. Swing.
.NET - in terms of client side GUI, Swing is now more widely used than WinForms - check any job site.
Sun aren't just competing with
Even in software industry. If SUN feils somebody will do it somewhere, look what happeneds with Ruby on Rails?
Yes, and what has happened with Ruby on Rails? Actually, very little so far. A lot of hype and noise.
I admit, it is a little unclear how a product can be a 'datacenter platform' and also a '.NET competitor', given that the two things hardly overlap at all.
As I see it, they are simply going to bundle existing stuff to porovide a standardized platform. Sun hardware running Solaris, with Oracle databases and Oracle's Fusion app server running Java web apps.
.NET is likely mentioned as the competitor to Java. Oracle and Solaris are going to do their damndest to get big business to pick Java. Currently they don't mention any new products at all; all this is is a complete hardware / software package for heavy-duty web applications.
I'd say Sun won the battle, but lost the war. Taking MS to task for making a Windows-optimized version of Java resulted in a big payday for Sun, but killed Java's chances on the Windows desktop.
I think it is more likely that EJB is oversold by companies that are making EJB products. EJB is useful or even necessary for some applications. However, I would say that using EJB in most applications is not appropriate and could kill the applications faster and better than anything else. Another problem is that nowadays, the IT industry field is dominated by people who don't know anything about technology. A lot of people who I came into contact with does not understand what is EJB or J2EE. I am not saying that I understand it very well, but at least I will not use EJB as a de facto persistent technology like what a lot of other people did.
yes, but EJB was designed by a committee and turned out to be a complete misfire ...
.net does not have an equivalent to EJB - just doesn't exist ....
.NET DOES have equivalents to these.
.NET has no equivalent - this is one of the most difficult things to implement.
people have used it because they were told that it was the right thing to do
however, in doing so, they have suffered serious productivity losses
Yes, like the most successful site on the net - EBay - which is based almost entirely on J2EE/EJB.
if you notice,
why is this? IT REALLY IS AN UNNECESSARY TECHNOLOGY! for many reasons
and if you look at EJB 3.0, it is so completely different than EJB 2.0, it would be hard to compare them
You are confusing two things. EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) and Entity Beans (or to be very specific - container managed persistence of Entity Beans).
Most of EJB has been very successful and popular - Message Beans, Stateless Session Beans.
Contrary to what you say,
What has been a problem, both in terms of performance and complexity is Entity Beans - the object relational mapping (ORM).
EJB 3.0 differs mainly from previous versions in the way it handles ORM. There is a new, very simple, version based on well-established Java technologies used successfully by hundreds of thousands of developers - Hibernate, TopLink and JDO.
this is NOT a troll - i know this for a fact, have spoken to them,
and have heard them admit it was a mistake.
Entity Beans as implemented up to EJB 2.1 were probably a mistake - they are the only part of EJB that EBay doesn't use.
as you can tell, i have an issue with EJB or any crap technology 'standard' that is delivered to the general public as the right thing to do.
Fortunately, Java is about choices. EJB 3.0 ORM is based on the choices that the public (the developers) have already made.
However, to claim that all of EJB is flawed is to misunderstand and misrepresent things - it has in general been highly successful.
however, you are beginning to now see another push to split java into an open source version and a sun version.
so, sun will have to do something again.
Why? It does not matter whether or not there are open source versions of Java. What matters is whether they pass the compatibility tests, so they can be labelled 'Java'. Sun have stated that they are entirely happy with this. There are many open source implementations of Java APIs that have passed such tests - indeed many of the reference versions of these APIs are open source!
Swing is terribly ugly and slow.
Just FUD. Swing is whatever you want it to look like - the look and feel is pluggable. As for slow, it is OpenGL and DirectX accelerated.
I'm in the same boat. I look after everything under the sun. Everything from shitty little 2 server ASP websites to 20 server clusters with TB's of backend disk.
I have java servlets used by over 2000 people 24x7. When was the last time I had to restart the JVM? Dec 2002. I also have 8 java (jsp) web applications used by 200,000 ISP customers 24x7. JVM uptimes range from 2 years to several months. On the flipside, i have applications that need to be restarted every week.
The difference? The developers.
Come off it, look at the core .Net technologies (before they were re-branded): COM (implementing the multiple interfaces per object idea without multiple inheritance) predates Java, ODBC predates JDBC etc. etc.
And those familiar with 1970s mainframe or minicomputer technology would know of such concepts by different names.
Look at almost any VMS on VAX installation. You'll see interoperability between languages (BLISS, C, COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1, plus many others) that worked quite well. Frederik Data Products offered a Smalltalk system in the mid 1980s that embodied many of the OO related traits of COM.
Not only that, but products like the DEC MDP database system offered the core concepts and benefits of ODBC far before ODBC did!
Not surprisingly, much leading edge technology was developed in the mainframe/minicomputer world. It was only later that it found its way onto lower-end servers, workstations and desktops.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
But, frankly, even if they do all that, it's too little too late. Sun is doomed anyway--they have proven conclusively that their management is incapable of adapting to changing environments. As for Java, Java has missed its opportunity: Java will be the new Pascal and the new Cobol rolled into one, which isn't bad, but it will never become the language of choice for more than those two niches.
I know Java is supposed to be fast but reality is that it sucks on that front.
Why not try a recent version? Things have changed hugely. It really is worth looking at an application like say, JEdit, under Java 1.5 before commenting.
why not just pour some real money into mono and then beat them at their own game ? and all the while PHP continues to drive something like 40% of the globes websites why is microsoft even a consideration here ?
We'll see. Consider that it's coming from the software and hardware company legendary for their high prices.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Java may be great to program in, but it cannot compete with .NET in a large environment. I spend the same amount of time screwing with fifteen different and conflicting version of the JRE for one program distributed to three users than five .NET programs distributed to one hundred users. Larger java webstart applications are the downright devil when they're cached into a user's windows profile and it's only recently that Sun instituted a buggy implementated system cache.
Java never turned out the way people said it would. It was supposed to be a cross platform web centric UI technology. As it turned out it did that job terribly. Now the entire purpose for Java seems to have been eliminated. Namely, there are really just two platforms left that have a real future, Windows and Linux.
The advantage that Oracle will gain by moving to Java interfaces is slower interfaces.
Both of these companies have similar problems and they are just teaming up to keep Microsoft from biting their heels off.
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Really? I have it on my XP desktop right now, and on my Cell phone too. It's behind many many web sites, a hell of a lot more than .NET. Java makes it so easy to port from one platform to another that running Java on Windows is trivial. There are 1000's of Java apps that run on Windows.
I think you need to re-examine the Sun-MS battle. MS was trying to pirate the Java langauge and make it run on NOTHING BUT Windows by adding proprieraty extensions as part of the "Standard". They are now trying the same trick in the EU with MS-Office.
I can see where your coming from. We use Oracle on our database already. Thats got a pretty hefty price tag, especially as you scale up. We are weening ourselves OFF of sun hardware after about 6 years of it. Of course the punchline is the new Opteron systems look great.
But at the end of the day keeping our tech budget low means making compromises, sometimes the right ones, sometimes the wrong ones. The less closed-source software we are locked into the better. After all, the point is being profitable and we've been tied to one or two (or more) products already that didn't really do much good for us in reality (Coldfusion, MS Sql) compared to open alternatives.
Anyhow, long and short of it is I agree. Where their appropriate and both companies have produced (and continue to) excellent (although expensive) products.
Right now I just don't see the need for yet another development platform, much less a closed one. Not in my budget any time in the near future anyway.
Quack, quack.
Javas biggest implementation will be application/menu/programming layers in the forthcoming Blue Ray DVD standard.
To
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Something clearly displayed when looking at Novell which almost immediatly started "OpenSuSE" after the release of OpenSolaris. Coincedence? I wonder...
The reason for OpenSuSE was Fedora Core, and the reason for Fedora Core was competition Debian and other free Linux distributions.
When they're talking about a ".NET killer", they're actually talking about a suicide pact.
Grow up boys, you're not Bill Gates. You're not going to be Bill Gates. That's not such a bad thing. People don't like Microsoft anyway.
QUIT running your companies like vengefull morons bent on doing everything with a goal of hurting Microsoft. Its getting predictable, boring, and less and less profitable.
Larry, you're not selling enough of your application suite to matter to anyone. Sorry to break that to you. Market share wise, you're still a database company and lately you're getting your clock cleaned on that front by MYSQL, MS SQL, and DB2 of all things. Why? Because you're so focused on your applications that nobody wants, that you make it impossible to do business with Oracle. You bought out Peoplesoft -- and trashed it. The folks I know in Munich can't stand what you've done to their work environment and projects. The problem, Larry, isn't Microsoft.
Scott.. WTF? Can't fine enough cool technology to give away this year? Your model is broken. Its been broken for years. The people who want non-microsoft servers are using Linux, not Solaris for new work. Its proving itself capable. Your hardware is too expensive for its performance -- its modeled after an old school "big blue" style sale with its service revenue coat-tails. How 70's and 80's. You've turned one of the most innovative and power companies in the world, into this decade's version of Silicon Graphics. Remember their last ditch effort? They came out with a high end graphics workstation with a non-standard embedded video rig that performed better but wasn't upgradeable. They were trying to compete with PC based workstations. Ooops. Now you're trying to compete with PC based servers without competing against IBM or Hitachi (et. al.). Ooops again.
Does anyone else but me remember the "Netscape-Sun-Aol Alliance" that was going to bring us J2EE based replacements for Windows servers and change all of us into J2EE freaks? Did ANYONE think an alliance like that could possible be stable? What are iPlanet sales like now?
The "Everyone but Bill" treehouse club is for 10 year olds. Its not for people running major corporations with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. Thank the FSM that I don't have any stock with you guys. You're like the poster children for why egomaniacs shouldn't be running public companies.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Personally, i'd like to be able to specify a code block at the end of the function that will execute after a return statement. That way you only have to write cleanup code once.
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I think C++'s lack of memory management and bad programming has lead to a shitload of buggy software. .Net manages that for you, so bad programming is less damaging.
Nah! He is just trying to tell everybody all the languages he has heard of. Too bad he does not understand the difference between a language and framework.
Since when did Microsoft become a bigger friend of Linux / Open source community than
Sun. Stop biting the hand that feeds you fools ! It was Sun that gave more code to
open source community, if it was not for them, you would have a pretty lame Networking
in Linux, along with many other things. Next time you pick on Sun, Why dont you show
your true colors by identifying who you work for, IBM, HP or yet another M$ sympathizer !
Your Stallman and Eric where just a bunch of weenies when Sun was duking it out
with MS for Unix !
Fools ! Slashdot and the Linux community has turned into a bunch of Bill Gates
fans !
This from an avid Java user and former Sun employee. The only fools who pick on
Sun work for IBM or HP or Microsoft. Hey, just incase you have not realised
Java is now the #1 language for Open source development.
You can't serously believe programming in C/C++ for the web would be less bugy than .NET. The protection from buffer overflows alone makes .Net less bugy than C/C++ for most web development.
Here are some features of c# 3
Implicitly typed local variables, which permit the type of local variables to be inferred from the expressions used to initialize them.
Extension methods, which make it possible to extend existing types and constructed types with additional methods.
Lambda expressions, an evolution of anonymous methods that provides improved type inference and conversions to both delegate types and expression trees.
Object initializers, which ease construction and initialization of objects.
Anonymous types, which are tuple types automatically inferred and created from object initializers.
Implicitly typed arrays, a form of array creation and initialization that infers the element type of the array from an array initializer.
Query expressions, which provide a language integrated syntax for queries that is similar to relational and hierarchical query languages such as SQL and XQuery.
Expression trees, which permit lambda expressions to be represented as data (expression trees) instead of as code (delegates).
Meanwhile sun is just getting around adding features like being able to turn off echo on the Console - While continue to ignore their own naming conventions. Java will still lack properties and indexers before c# 3.0 features are in full effect!
i want to call your message a horrible troll, but it doesn't even make sense. trolls are usually a particuarly obnoxious, but plausible, point of view, presented as-fact with no supporting evidence.
.net were invented precisely because of the difficulty of C/C++ environments. I'm not saying java/.net are showing up in aircraft (yet?), but C/C++ is NOT known for its non bugginess and stellar reliability :)
nothing about what you're written is plausible.
The most ridiculous thing you wrote -- that really convinced me to respond -- was the bit about non-buggy code for reliable systems/aircraft being written in C/C++.
With this gem, you immediately disqualify yourself from any possible further serious consideration. Managed platforms like java and
In any case, the one avionics system i have a dim knowledge of is the F-15 program, and my understanding is that it primarily used Ada... which you dont mention at all.
My last little lecture here, to try and set you straight:
people that take religous or ideological positions about technology ("C is the best language ever", "Fortan is better than C#") are hurting themselves and the industry. Any given technolgy has good and bad points about it, for a particular targeted use, implemented by a particular team/engineer, and deployed/supported for a specified time.
With programming languages and development environments, there is no hammer that makes every problem a nail.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Does that mean they'll pay people to use it? .NET Framework is free.
Apparently you were caught in a class loading problem you didn't understand. You need to have a look at the article series Demystifying class loading problems, on the IBM DevelopersWorks site.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
The only reason I don't like Java is the only language choice in Java. At least in .NET I can choose what I want to code in. Why not run with Mono? Like Sun having a monopoly on one programming language is any different than Microsoft? Bitter, party of one.
Best,
-Auri
Author, Geek My Ride, http://www.geekmyride.net
your post is dead on. too bad for larry he has let this issue completely define him. he's missed a lot of markets because he was obsessively chasing microsoft. in any case it seems every two or three years larry makes some claim to the meme du jour - corba, application service providers (asp), java, linux, soa, etc and tries to redefine the industry based on this so-called vision. but oracle has never been able to move the industry in this way no matter how hard they try, which is usually not very hard. larry has a critical dilemma - his core product is being rapidly commoditized and he has not been able to transform his company into something with greater future value. oracle isn't going away - those database installations will be paying his jet fuel bills until he dies, but oracle's days as a growth story are long gone.
You want to know why .NET is growing at a fast pace? I can download VS.NET Express for free, and inside of 10 minutes, have my first web app (hello world, or whatever) running right there on the box, with all of about 10 clicks total from download to running app.
Now, how do you do that with Java? It's a bunch of disparate technogies with all their own quirks that need to be all working in unison with magic incantations to get everything to work. You need to get and configure Apache and Tomcat. You need to install the JVM. You need to download and install Eclipse or something similar. You need to build your skeleton and get it all going. You really have to be an ubergeek to get started in this environment. VS.NET makes it so ANYONE can get started if they want to.
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That's part of the problem. Consistency between applications in a windowing system is a great boon to the casual user... and to users who don't like
Swing is pluggable, yet I can't choose to use my own OSes widgets. Why is that? Instead, I have to use
, which, instead of using the library already in memory to render them, loads its own library.Just FUD.
Here, I'll even help spread some FUD. I was looking at using the Java Media Framework (JMF) recently to play some video files. However, I was using Swing to write the GUI. Here's what Sun has to say about Swing and JMF:
Got that? Sun doesn't use Swing components because they don't perform as well as native components. If Sun doesn't use them, why should anyone else?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Sorry, ended a sentence without completing a thought. The first paragraph in the preceding post should read "That's part of the problem. Consistency between applications in a windowing system is a great boon to the casual user... and to users who don't like skinnable applications."
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The battle never ended. You just got used to the sound of the cannons.
.NET is a *direct* response to Java. And Microsoft took the time to do it right, which has a sinigifcant possibility of killing off new Java development in the long run. .NET is light years ahead of Java in terms of ease of development -- which is what matters to people who are responsible for making money.
Microsoft was not trying to make Java proprietary; Microsoft was trying to make it integrate properly into Windows. If Sun had worked with them instead of against them, Java would probably be a very popular platform for desktop applications. Instead, it's gotten itself pidgeonholed on the server side.
Meanwhile, as a direct result of Sun's lack of cooperation, Microsoft decided to build their own wheel.
Technologies that work well on the desktop do tend to find their way onto the server. Just look at Windows for proof of that.
--S
-- sigs cause cancer.
IIRC Swing has been around way longer than .NET, and that's probably why you see so many more postings. Or maybe it's because you don't need a "WinForms developer" to write for Winforms. YMMV. But that's not what I wanted to post about.
.NET for over 50% of our services, and it's growing rapidly because .NET has proven that it scales better than most other solutions (Java included). .NET is just now creeping onto the radar in the enterprise. My prediction: 2006 or perhaps 2007 will be the year that .NET overtakes Java in terms of new development. It won't take much longer than that, though. What you're seeing is the after-effects of Microsoft's early marketing attempts, which didn't really tell anyone what .NET was (why would I want it? Microsoft didn't answer that question well). Now it's starting to get traction as more and more people understand just what .NET is, and it will probably be exponential.
I wanted to speak to Enterprise data centers, since I work in such an environment. Said environment is, in fact, one of the top 10 most visited web sites in the US according to some analysts (lies, damn lies, and statistics as always, so I won't bother being more specific).
We use
--S
-- sigs cause cancer.
Yeah, .NET alternative, whatever. Wake me up when I can actually run the current Oracle database release on the current hardware from Sun! We just bought a bunch of Sun's new dual-core AMD boxes and we have to install Linux on them to run Oracle 10g in 64-bit mode -- Solaris AMD64 support is supposed to come "in the first half of 2006." Kind of sad considering the way Sun and Oracle sing each other's praises all the time. Scott McNealy even spoke at an Oracle conference over a year ago about how Solaris 10 was the Oracle platform of choice! Um, yeah, right, if it actually worked it might be.
Thats funny because i remember Ebay blaming sun for their outtages a while back which costs ebay millions of dollars.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
"I have it on my XP desktop right now"
And perhaps you're one of the very few who actually run java applications on your desktop, most people don't.
"and my Cell phone too"
Which has nothing to do with the Windows desktop.
"It's behind many many web sites"
Which also has nothing to do with the Windows desktop.
"Java makes it so easy to port from one platform to another that running Java on Windows is trivial. There are 1000's of Java apps that run on Windows"
The question is not whether one can create Java apps that run on Windows but rather whether developers use Java when their product is specifically required to run on Windows. In most cases, platform-independence is not required. Windows customers would much rather have a responsive product that runs only on Windows than a slower product that could run on a platform they have no intention to use.
"MS was trying to pirate the Java langauge and make it run on NOTHING BUT Windows by adding proprieraty extensions as part of the "Standard"."
My speculation is that once Standard Java was established and was popular on many platforms including Windows, Sun planned to sell proprietary hardware to accelerate Java's performance to native speeds. MS's Windows-specific implementation undermined that plan by making Java faster on Windows without special hardware, so Sun decided to fight them.
From TFA: "Rather than emphasizing open standards -- an area where both companies fall significantly short of competitors..."
What a load of crap. Whilst Oracle may (or may not) fall foul of this accusation, Sun have probably the most long-standing and solid commitment to open standards of any tech company. Almost everything they've done has been based on open standards through their entire history.
Mod this article "crap".
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
But what are exactly the components of the said "tech stack" that Java does not have? I mean, is there anything below the Sun (the celestial body, not the company) that Java does not have?!
Correction, Swing requires MANY MORE PEOPLE to build than WinForms
Don't be silly. A Swing interface can be done in a few seconds using a GUI designer like NetBeans. This has to be one of the worst attempt to justify an argument I have ever read on Slashdot!
IIRC Swing has been around way longer than .NET, and that's probably why you see so many more postings.
.NET overtakes Java in terms of new development.
.NET overtaking Java for a long time. But this is meaningless as they are largely used for different things - .NET as an upgrade for the existing (and pretty saturated) VB6 and VC++ Windows development and Java for Server Side development. Most large companies use .NET and Java together.
My prediction: 2006 or perhaps 2007 will be the year that
These show a misunderstanding of what is happening. Swing has only just taken off on the desktop because it was truly awful in terms of speed and looks more than a couple of years ago: No-one was seriously using Swing before that.
Secondly, there has been mention of
Thats funny because i remember Ebay blaming sun for their outtages a while back which costs ebay millions of dollars.
Firstly, that was in 1999! You are trying to make a point about modern J2EE with an example six years old!
Secondly, that has not stopped them continuing with J2EE/EJB and making billions ever since.
That's part of the problem. Consistency between applications in a windowing system is a great boon to the casual user...
I have never believed this. It is just a developer's myth. Users usually haven't the slightest problem determining what a button or menu is, no matter what the GUI.
Anyway, if consistency is a major advantage, why to Microsoft keep changing looks and feels so much>
My point was that how people work.
.NET ASP gaining much speed, not JSP or Java application servers. On the desktop, I've not yet seen swarm of formidable Java graphical applications. Anyone who has done things in both fields, is not hard pressed to figure out why it would be so.
.NET, but I'm saying that Java has real life weakness where .NET is much better. I also think that denying that would not help anybody else than Microsoft.
Maybe VB has changed a lot, but it can be easier to management to send experienced VB programmaer to learn VB . NET than to hire altogether new one. It can be also more motivating to go forward with envoriment and programming syntax you're atleast familiar with.
Another important point is the spread of programming languages and easiness to get support in forms of sensible editors and ready enviroment. Programmers in fast few years or a decade, propably have learned C++ or JAVA. And lot of companies still hava lot of VB applications and code. Dot NET is also supported by MS so much that editors and are enviroment quite ready.
I've done enough with Java to know I like I, but I also say it's many times resource hug and not-so-elegant from a developores point of view. On the web front I'd wager my pets on Ruby, PHP or even
I'm not saying that everybody should do
So propably Ellison & Co are going to right direction. Another question of course is that will anything tangible come out of it?
And let's not go 'yes this language can do anything' arguments either, we bit experienced programmers propably know that almost anything can be done with most programming languages. It's eally besides the point, because real limitation is time and how much it is sensible to debug something to get it work.
There are also lot of programmers out there who don't control well the enviroment they work in. Those do or are just really dilligent, may also developed utter disintrest of debugging contiously the enviroment(I have). So lot of people do have a tendency to gravitate where everything is set ready for them, reason or another. So having support for something, doesn't tell is the support good enough so people will really want to use it.
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows has the trouble seen me, even I sometimes wonder why I write these line
Look all above mentioned technologies are in the same range! I see Ruby and Ruby on Rails as the REAL ALTERNATIVE to both Java and .NET.
It does not mean we stop using strong typing class of languages, but when you need to do the best you can in shortest period of time you have, you cannot overlook RoR.
"as you can tell, i have an issue with EJB or any crap technology 'standard' that is delivered to the general public as the right thing to do."
.Net, Visual Basic, and many other crap technologies.
Then you must have an issue with the Windows family of OS, Internet Explorer, ActiveX,
Your post does not explain why EJB is crap. It only states that you think so and that you claim some IBM and Sun employees have admitted it was a mistake. I honestly have no experience or opinion either way, but your "Score:4, Insightful" post does not help me form one.
Actually C# is more of a java clone, since java has been around a lot longer.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I don't know, but I'd really like to slap the Office team.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
No.
.NET competitor.
EJB is just one part of J2EE which is the closest thing to a
You can do J2EE without EJB (and in most cases, probably should).
Advanced users are users too!
You MS FUD guys are SO Funny. Grow up and join the REAL IT world where portability IS important. Your application may need to support Windows, Unix, handhelds and other devices. You can't do that with .NET.
Oh, and all the Java tools and software from Sun are FREE and soon a lot of it will be open source. MS would never do that.
I can see you don't understand programming at all. The speed of the application is more commonly a factor of how badly or well the programmer wrote the code than the systems Architecture (J2EE or .NET). If he/she wrote the code to take advantage of certain features of the .NET app server and/or operating system (which makes it non-portable and hard to maintain) it will run faster than code that does not such as J2EE.
SUN still owns the Java standard, but has NOT introduced a "Java accelerator" nor has anyone else. Java doesn't NEED it so I don't forsee anyone doing it.
I'm tired of arguing with those who are just re-hasing MS FUD. This thread is dead, I have better ones to waste my time on.
You're still missing the point. All of those "multitude" of servers are complex to set up in the first place.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
So, then, it's free, like Microsoft's .NET is?
.NET runtimes.
Microsoft doesn't charge for the barebones C# compiler (csc.exe), last I checked (I think it comes with the runtimes and one of the service packs), nor did they charge anybody who wanted to download the
Also, Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 express edition is currently free.
You seem to have missed the boat (again).
.NET2 and the new version of SQL Server.
Sun and Oracle are simply working together with their own FUD Response to the release of
Get with the game.
Perhaps if you weren't being such a spelling Nazi all the time, you would have noticed that.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
"Microsoft added proprietary methods to java.lang.* classes in a blatant attempt to trick developers into writing unportable apps"
Were there really any developers who believed they were writing a portable application using J++ only to find when they released their product, that some of their customers couldn't run it in on a Unix machine?
Generally speaking there were primarily two kinds of developers at the time J++ was introduced: Those targeting Windows exclusively and writing their applications using tools running on Windows and those who cared about cross-platform apps and developed them on Unix.
The Unix folks had no interest developing applications using MS tools and the Windows folks had no interest in developing applications that ran on Unix. There were exceptions of course, but this was generally true.
"SUN still owns the Java standard, but has NOT introduced a "Java accelerator" nor has anyone else."
From Byte.com in November 1996:
"Sun is also dev eloping a more expensive (approximately $100) chip called ultraJava, which will be for desktop systems. Sun officials won't say whether or not ultraJava chips will use a picoJava core. However, these chips could include multimedia capabilities such as JPEG decompression and the graphics-processing optimizations now found in Sun's UltraSPARC RISC processors.
BYTE couldn't obtain actual silicon samples of Sun's Java chips at press time, so we don't know how well picoJava succeeds at boosting Java performance. According to Sun, these chips will run Java programs about 12 times faster than the same code executed by Sun's current Java interpreter."
An old VB/Delphi/whatever Windows developer downloads NetBeans, fires up the GUI designer and asks, "this Java Swing stuff, how hard can this be?" So they click on a button widget, drag it to a form, and fire up the application. They get this big honkin button which takes up the entire form. "No problemo, I will simply drag this button over into a corner on the Form Designer." Fire up the program, and you still have a big honkin button taking up the entire form without any apparent way of changing its location.
You see, the VB/Delphi/whatever Windows school of GUI development is pixel-based and folks are used to using the Form Designer to place a widget on the form and then tweak locations and placement on a pixel level to satisfy their client/bosses/customers. Yeah, yeah, when you resize the form, now what? But for a lot of people, they do pixel-level layout using the form designer and kind of assume no one ever resizes the form. Also, a switch between large font/small font on Windows can jazz up a lot of Delphi widgets, but we will assume no one ever makes that switch either.
The Java Swing people know about layout managers, and layout managers solve all of the above problems -- font size changes, form resizes. But the layout manager world is a bizarro world to the form designer pixel-placement world. It is kind of like the gulf between WYSIWYG and TeX/LaTeX -- Word and its WYSIWYG cousins are like the pixel-placement world while the TeX world is related to layout managers. But just as TeX word processing is largely generic text editor plus document preview -- does anyone have a workable TeX/LaTeX WYSIWYG -- do layout manager GUI more properly belongs in the vi/emacs/pico and javac world -- does it even make sense to have a graphical form designer in the layout-manager world.
So to VB people, the .NET Form Designer is quite comfortable and familiar and Windows Forms is pixel-placement friendly while Swing/Netbeans is in the bizarro world of layout managers. I am not saying layout managers are bad -- I do a lot of word processing using LaTeX -- it is just that people who are not indoctrinated in them get frustrated real quick on Java Swing and return to what they are used to.
Uh, I do that on a daily basis with
Which is why they released the spec and let the Mono guys build their *own* open source version.
I would politely suggest that, instead of wasting time being a zealot, you go get an actual job as a programmer. The real world tends to cure zealotry in all but the most hardcore cases.
--S
-- sigs cause cancer.
I would have to admit, far less than 90% of the Java code I've seen out there -- and I've been using it since v1.02 -- has catch (Exception e) {}.
I would even venture to say that the majority of code I've seen that I have written and has been written be others didn't do that.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
You're kidding about adding "portable unsafe code", right? That's what keeps the virus in business and why Windows is such a petri dish.
Why does the license matter for an alternative to .NET? If people who used .NET cared about open source, they would not be using .NET, so why should an alternative be open source. Sounds like an unsubstantiated religious rant to me.
I love how people get all "McCarthy" at Sun and Java over the license, while they continue to give M$ a hall pass on the same topic.
This is where the truth cannot be hidden within the BS because actions speak louder than words. The continued support and adoption of .NET means nothing more than "quality, security, and freedom do not matter".
I do not and never will use Windows or .NET