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Sun's Phipps Slams App Engine's Java Support

Posted by samzenpus on from the you're-both-pretty dept.

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.'"

2 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Re:do their own then... by Ifni · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    As far as I'm concerned, Sun (or anyone complicit in their activities re: Java) lost all right to bitch about this once every new version of Java consistently broke backwards compatibility with previous versions. I'm sick of updating to the latest version of Java and having every existing Java application (I'm looking at you, Cisco) stop working, even though you keep each previous version installed by default. I mean really, what's the point of having a half dozen versions of the JVM installed if the only thing it uses is the latest one?

    And yes, I know you can tweak a file here and there to force a given application to use a given JVM (and, if the app - not Java - supports it, Launcher), but that fails to address two important issues - a) that a given java app can't specify what version of the JVM it wants, and b) that even within a given version (say 1.6 update 7 versus 1.6 update 11) the functionality of (and maybe even interfaces to) included objects changes to the point of breaking compatibility.

    I used to hate Java (and JavaScript) because it took forever to load, turning a screaming fast Internet connection into a rush hour exercise in patience, but they improved that and I started singing the praises of Java and JavaScript. Then I found that even though JavaScript is still good, Java now drives me crazy because I can't keep it updated unless I want to get under the hood and fix everything it broke in the applications I use. And with the recent trend of releasing an updated JVM once every 2 months or so, this gets very tedious, very fast.

    --

    Oh, was that my outside voice?

  2. Misnomers? Misuse of words? by davidsyes · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Flaunt vs flaut... there is a difference.

    http://grammartips.homestead.com/pairs3.html
    http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/flaunt.html

    Too bad his publicist/administrative assistant (or, he himself) missed the difference in the words.

    (No, i am not bragging nor showing off, nor being pedant. I am just pointing it out...)

    --
    Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"