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Oracle Unveils New Open Source BerkeleyDB Release
Mark Brunelli writes to tell us that Oracle has released the newest version of the open source Oracle BerkeleyDB Java Edition. From the article: "The new release of the Java embeddable database is the third to come out in three years and the first new version to come out of Sleepycat Software since Oracle purchased the open source stalwart back in February. Rex Wang, Oracle's vice president of embedded systems and a former vice president of marketing at Sleepycat, said the latest release lets Java developers take advantage of a new Persistence application programming interface (API) that provides greater flexibility and new performance optimizations that enable applications to run faster."
I thought it was funny that the article mentions "high-performance" and "Java" in the same sentence. IMHO, it's inappropriate to be writing "high-performance" applications in an interpreted language like Java. For the same amount of keystrokes, I can do it right the first time and write it in C and not have to worry about performance issues.
Your comments are all valid, except I disagree with the last one. I find myself pleasantly surprised by the performance of Eclipse and applications based on its platform (in terms such as interface responsiveness). The other point I would make in contrary to yours is that Java is, these days at least, primarily intended for server applications. Most code written on the Java platform is never touched by the end user, but rather agents acting on behalf of the user. Hence interface response is rarely a concern.
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But why is OpenOffice dog-ass slow?
OpenOffice isn't written in Java. It optionally uses it for various scripting components. The speed of OOo (which is actually pretty good these days) has everything to do with the performance of C/C++ code.
And Azureus?
Works fine here. Maybe if you put more than 64MB in your system, you'd see better response out of programs that are memory demanding? And I can't think of anything that demands more memory than an app that caches hundreds of megs of P2P data in memory.
Why does my system slow to a crawl for more than a minute when I launch Yahoo Pool or Slime Volleyball?
For the exact same reason your system slows down when you launch that ActiveX game embedded in a webpage. (Hint: The game is using CPU.)
Speaking of Slime Volleyball, why does that damn game play at different speeds on every computer?
Because the developer programmed it that way? Seems obvious to me.
I'm talking about a 3GHz/2GB machine here.
Suuuuurrrreee you are. Which is to say that you have a 1GHz machine with 64MB of RAM, but you felt like bashing Java because Firefox is running slow on your system. (Hint: It needs at least 128MB to handle all the preloading it does.)
This is almost as good as the "I've been waiting for 20 minutes for a file to copy!" troll. Keep up the bad work and maybe you'll even start a new slashdot meme. (You wish.) </sarcasm>
* Yes, the 64MB remark is sarcastic hyperbole. I don't know how much RAM you have, but you're obviously doing something wrong.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade