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Oracle's Java Company Change Breaks Eclipse
crabel writes "In Java 1.6.0_21, the company field was changed from 'Sun Microsystems, Inc' to 'Oracle.' Apparently not the best idea, because some applications depend on that field to identify the virtual machine. All Eclipse versions since 3.3 (released 2007) until and including the recent Helios release (2010) have been reported to crash with an OutOfMemoryError due to this change. This is particularly funny since the update is deployed through automatic update and suddenly applications cease to work."
Java is no better than Visual Basic, where the JRE is just a big VB runtime. But slower. And buggier. And fatter. And it's not the panacea that Sun made it out to be. I'm not impressed by Sun's promises, JRE dependencies, the huge meaningless dumps when an error occurs, and that frickin' garbage collection. I'm a recipient of apps that are bug-laden due to devs using class libs that they can't debug and fix. Instead of writing something that they know works, they'll grab some reusable class that shouldn't be reused, but something new and appropriate should have been coded instead. "Run anywhere" is "Runs mostly" in my production environment, and it's BS. Fanboys can bury this all they want, but I'm not impressed by Sun's promises. Reusable my ass.
1. Anybody who wants to distribute Java out of the box has to pay for a runtime license. This is why your OS doesn't include it and makes you download it from Sun/Oracle. 2. Java's original business model was to charge big for the server on which to host your Java app. 3. Oracle/Sun are profit-driven entities, and therefore if they're not making money off of Java they'll discontinue it.