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Sun's Phipps Slams App Engine's Java Support
narramissic writes "Sun Microsystems' chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, said in an April 11 blog post that Google committed a major transgression by only including support for a subset of Java classes in its App Engine development platform. 'Whether you agree with Sun policing it or not, Java compatibility has served us all very well for over a decade,' Phipps wrote. 'That includes being sure as a developer that all core classes are present on all platforms. Creating subsets of the core classes in the Java platform was forbidden for a really good reason, and it's wanton and irresponsible to casually flaunt the rules.' Phipps characterized his remarks as non-official, saying: 'This isn't something I could comment on on Sun's behalf. My personal comments come purely from my long association with Java topics.'"
There's nothing that Sun hates more than a Java implementation that is designed to run faster than "100% slow Java".
The fact is that Java's claim of WORA has always been a pipe dream and it certainly doesn't work well on phones.
The reason that OAK was such a failure for embedded systems is that Gosling et al. didn't have any experience in developing successful embedded systems.
Java libraries favor abstraction over simplicity and performance which is fine on the server but counter-productive on a resource-limited device like a phone.