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Java 2 & Hotspot on Linux in 2000
djKing wrote to us with the news that
Sun will be releasing a "Java2-compliant JVM for Linux that brings the performance, functions, and Java HotSpot
features of the latest Java specifications to the Linux community", which will be announced at the Java Developers' Conference. As well, IBM will be announcing the free general availability of a JSDK 1.18-compliant JVM, with performance better then that of Windows NT JVMs.
Not only don't I like it, I dispute your general point.
Java support among most companies is a mile wide and an inch thick. They all talk the talk (caught up in the tornado of hype), but many companies are holding back on real deployments.
I suppose people just didn't learn enough from Microsoft that closed development platforms are ultimately harmful. Until Java is truly open, its just another Visual Basic to me.
>(8< ~ we come in peace
My company has been developing/deploying linux/java systems for 3 years now, and it's a winning combo. More attention to java on linux from Sun and IBM is a good thing.
Bravo! Absolutely. In some cases, though, maybe four or five years. My (recently deceased) AMD K6-2 PR300 (real clock 233Mhz I think) wasn't that much faster than an AMD K6 75Mhz at running Java. 4x clock speed won't necessarily translate into 4x execution speed because of other bottlenecks.
Female Prison Rape in NY
I've had no problems with JDBC or JFC using IBM JDK 1.1.8. I do cross-version tests using Borland's 1.1.6 on NT, IBM JDK 1.1.8 on NT, IBM JDK 1.1.8 on Linux, and had also been using a JavaSoft JDK 1.1.8 on NT. The 1.1.6 JDKs periodically behave oddly with JFC, but that isn't surprising as it's technically downlevel from what JFC requires (I was actually surprised it worked at all with 1.1.6.)
I have had a lot of problems with JFC under Gnome, but it works properly with KDE and fvwm2. I found issues with the Triteal CDE itself with my latest kernel upgrades, but that affected everything -- not just the JDKs.
The only "bug" I found with IBM's JDK is present on both the NT and Linux versions: it gave me warnings/errors on code that had been compiling clean for months. When I looked into the errors, I found out the IBM compilers were correct, and Sun's and Borland's hadn't been detecting and reporting the problem properly.
My only complaint with IBM JDK 1.1.8 for Linux is that it's performance is comparable to Borland's 1.1.6 on NT, taking about 3-4 times as long as their NT version to run the same application code. My guess is that the problem is my use of CPU-intensive long-running threads -- there might be an issue with the way threads are managed on Linux.
Speaking of CPU-intensive threads, I found I had to drop the thread priority to minimum in order to keep the GUI responsive under NT, but under Linux the GUI remains responsive even if I bump up the priority higher than default.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Ah, as I suspected. A very big difference. As I said in another post, real-world Java processes usually last more than 9 seconds, so start up time is insignificant. Also, to repeat myself, if you wrap the whole code in a for loop with 200 iterations the JIT should kick in more, especially if it's Hotspot, and it should get much closer to C's speed for 200 iterations.
Female Prison Rape in NY
dear idiot, until there is a SOLID 1.2 JVM and ther is generally a VM release at the same time that windows and solaris get it, java is behind. in case you havent noticed 90% of the middleware, ecommerce servers, etc. are using java.
sun is a business. they have shareholders and quarterly profits to make. generally speaking they are ok in my book - java is cool, its _relatively_ open (see IBM) and it will never reach teh level of ubiquity of ms. keep your eyes on reality...
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
I was too lazy to try replacing the StreamTokenizer - interesting to see how much it helped. I also tried replacing the ArrayList with a LinkedList, but didn't see much improvement at the time... good work!
Again, it goes to show that with a minimal amount of profiling and a decent knowledge of the libraries you can really speed up slow Java code quite a bit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think that the Blackdown 1.2 pre-release contains the Solaris x86 JIT, which is OK but gets beaten badly by the IBM, Microsoft, and Symantec compilers. Sun even has a better JIT: their compiler for the Windows JVM is much better than the Solaris x86 compiler.
You gotta figure that the recent turnover in Sun Java management is probably part of the recent decision to support Linux. Until the 1.2 pre-releases, the Blackdown VM didn't even include a compiler!
Overall, having Hotspot on Linux, backed by Sun, is a very positive step.
CORBA was just the first example that jumped into my mind. And I agree with you. CORBA's too heavy. But that doesn't justify DCOM's existance.
One of the reasons that I prefer to use Java is that it provides useful information when it dies; if you need to run a genetic algorithm for three weeks and it keeps freezing at random times, it's awefully nice to know exactly what's causing the problem. I've also found that it's easier to produce bug free code in Java. A lot of Sun's talk about how hard it is to make mistakes in Java is hype, but there is a little truth to it. (Got rid of pointers, my #$$)
I can also e-mail code to people at other colleges and they can run it with a minimum of fuss. That's very handy when you're working with someone who uses a different operating system and your program uses a GUI.
As for speed, it's a small slow down. Wait 18 months and the hardware will catch up. I think that the reliability and portability make up for being a little behind the bleeding edge of speed. And if you need performance that badly, buy a compiler that can produce native code. Right now I'm using genetic algorithms to predict the tertiary structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence (or trying to). I don't care if my GA takes one week or three weeks; it would take several billion years to do it by brute force - either of the first two cases is great.
Obviously Java isn't the right language for Quake 4, but most applications don't depend on eeking the last few cycles out of the CPU.
Tim is an avid fan of Perl. When he teaches XML to his classes he teaches to parse it in Perl first, and maybe Java later.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
James Clark writes about 50/50 in C and Java.
When you say "[Java] certainly isn't slower than Perl/PHP/CFML/etc" you are actually saying "[Java] certain is faster than Perl/PHP/CFML/etc" (just reverse the "isn't slower" into "is faster"). That's not the experience I and a lot of companies I've consulted for have had. YMMV.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Java is slow - deal with it. If you look at the designs of Java and Perl, its obvious why. Perl uses a few built-in types that are highly optimized. Java is based entirely on the notion of a hierarchy of types from the standard classes, or user defined classes. They may look pretty, but they have a lot of overhead. Thats also why the C++ is slow in the stats I gave.
We are using Java for rewritting a server from C++ to Java. Why ? Because it's easier to run it in other platforms now (like Linux, and a PC), it's more flexible and has even better performance than the C++ version due to some design changes that are easier to implement and maintain in Java. At least promote Java for things it is good at... 1. Sun's Marketting (a close second to MS) 2. Threading 3. Type Safety 4. Exception handling 5. Memory Management none of these are perfect, but as a language it does solve some of the problems. Then again with decent libraries C++ is effective in these areas also. Programming is really about trade-offs. Then again I don't really care language wise outside of the generalization about speed of Java over C++, which is not even backed up with proof. portal sites == usenet with ads
I've been running the 1.2 JRE on Linux for a couple of months now. Must be some effort in there somewhere, eh?
Microsoft's "Java 2" VM is only 1.1.4 compliant. Apple's best release so far I believe is 1.1.6 -- so while I 'm glad Sun is making announcements, I'm even more thankful that there are people like those at Blackdown who are working to make Linux a more viable platform. Java 2 servlet support has been a big boost to the Apache team as well.
But Sun provides Java implementations for Windows NT/9x...
Probably because it beats the pants off of java for rapid development.
You can't write big applications with Perl. You are not able to understand your own code in perl one week after you wrote it, if it has more than 30 lines. Perl can be faster and smaller than Java, but it is not perfect either.
---> Did you know Linux stands for Linux Is Not UniX ?
this port was done by Sun, and given to Blackdown to 'productize'. Now Sun is picking it up again. I doubt it will be the same VM (HotSpot should be *the* VM), but it's a good start.
First, to those who think Java is closed, let's get it straight, Java is open...Suns _implementation_ of Java is closed! Anyone can download and implement the Java spec...as several have. And Sun is at least attempting to achieve some consensus and standardization for what they create, which is a hell of a lot better than most other companies (how many people did MS ask for input on, say, DCOM???).
Sun's implementation of the spec may be closed, but it is still more open than a lot of other closed software. Their community source licence, if not that great, is at least a step in the right direction, and if other companies took this step, we would be decidedly better off. It takes time for the corporate world to embrace, understand, and experiment with open software...Sun is heading it the right direction. Keep in mind, they have to make money to survive. Eventually, given the same time C/C++ has had, there will be many good open implementations.
Java being an open specification, with independant, and open implementations, makes it as open as anything else in this world. Just because there are closed implementations, doesn't make Java closed. If Sun started charging $10,000 for their Java implementation tomorrow...what would happen? The whole community would start working on Kaffe, and you can bet IBM (with all they have invested) would do a cleanroom and open source it, but basically, life would go on without Sun. What would all the Visual Basic programmers do if MS started charging $10,000 for VB? Look at how many people use VB! (Don't even get me started on comparing them)
As for Java changing "every five minutes" as some people like to quote, or about it being unstable and buggy. Well, that's true, or at least it has been in the past. But Java is a really new language!!!! I'll say it again...it's new! Java, like Linux in some ways, has been pushed into the spotlight before it's time, because it fills the need better than any of the alternatives. I think Sun has done a great job of moving the languages features forward quickly enough that MS can't hijack it by adding missing/needed features that will in turn tie Java to Windows. Being a full time Java developer, I could never go back to C++/Win32, despite the bugs, and a _few_ missing bits here and there, Java is a _great_ language to work with. Stability and speed, and more open implementations, these will all come with time. Actually, Swing is becoming useable, and the new JIT's are actually quite fast on "reasonable" hardware.
Java is just now really starting to become a viable platform. Linux is in the same vote, it's a relatively new operating system, and is still evolving at a pace at least as quickly (or more) than Java in areas such as multimedia, multitrack digital recording, DVD, USB, component architectures (KOM/Open Parts), etc.
Most importantly, Java is the only real chance Linux has of putting down windows in the enterprise. Even once all the productivity apps are in place on Linux, and the interface (Gnome/KDE) blows away Windows, and it's easy enough for grandma to install, the MS installed base is going to be the problem. Java gives companies a way to easily migrate from Windows to Linux. Java is the link that will let this happen. Normally, convincing a MS based company to develop their inhouse software on Linux would be impossible. But Java is a good language for _MANY_ other reasons than being cross platform, which will get companies to use it, even if it's only on top of Windows. Then one day, when they discover Linux, they will find that they can slowly (or quickly) throw away their Windows boxes without spending a trillion dollars migrating a myriad of software all at once. Without Java, it will never happen.
That is why Linux and Java are a good match.
i've heard that linux is getting a fast tcp/ip stack someday...and a journaling filesystem too.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
http://www.javasoft.com/pr/1998/11/pr981102-01.htm l
This is from Nov 2, 1998! Almost one year later, Sun has still not released a Java 2 SDK for Linux! This is just Sun's annual "We are going to suppot Linux, really, we are" vapor statement.
I know there are some serious problems with native threads on anything less than kernel 2.2 and glibc 2.1.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Except you are always programing for the lowest common denominator instead of actually exploiting that expensive E10000. On the server side, you want platform DEPENDENCE, not independence. You might as well get something out of an E10000 running Solaris once you've spent the money on it - you WANT to use all the neato performance tweaks that only SYSTEM PROGRAMMING can expose.
>I'm wondering if anyone out there uses Java for
>something useful. Perhaps I sound naive, but I've
>never seen it deployed beyond annoying applets or
>slow as molasses games in COS246 (Java Programming)
Well, the company I work for has a rather large internet app (read millions of users) that is run entirely with Java and Oracle. While much of the development is done in linux, all of the servers are solaris, primarily because of the superior jvm. A great jvm would go along way to further our arguments to try out linux on the production side.
chris
I hope they do something about GUI performance. Until they get rid of the toolkits the Java GUI performance on unix will just suck compared to Windows and OS/2. Xlib->Xt->Xm->AWT->Swing... Too many layers. Also: in the long term we need to improve X graphics API (OpenGL?), because doing Java2D purely on the app side makes things slow and restricted to mostly software implementation.
Blackdown has had a Java 2 release for a while now. They have put a lot of effort into this and previous releases. They have put up with being at the bottom of Sun's list and generally being ignore, and they have been able to keep within a few months of Sun's releases anyway. Sun has been promising to keep them better informed for years now, with no change of policy. Blackdown has been doing an excellent job.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
My issue with the Blackdown port is that, beautifully compliant as it is, it lacks a JIT compiler. My benchmarks make the Kaffe JITC about three times as fast as the Blackdown JDK's interpreter. I consider interpreted Java unusable -- making my computer three times slower (at least) than it should be is not acceptable.
I'm withholding judgement on JITC'd Java as I haven't found at JITC that will run everything. Kaffe will run my little toy tests, but it dies when trying to run a real app like NetBeans (which is apparently pretty evil, they recommend not running with a JITC). NetBeans under the interpreter runs like it was on a 386. I just downloaded the IBM JDK 1.18. I'd really like to port some Java stuff to C++ and compare for speed. Anyone know of any similar benchmarks that have already been done?
As I am currently employed in my second job involving a large scale java server application, I can say without a doubt, yes, yes, most emphatically yes, people write real software in Java.
Sometimes we have regrets, but I had those in C and C++ too. On the whole, java has been a great step forward. It could be a heck of a lot better but it is more than usable right now.
Such as
Didn't think so...
Seems to me that multithreaded Java apps seem to scale pretty well just from throwing more and faster processors at them as long as you're actively using multiple threads, from a single-processor laptop for development to a dual-processor Linux box for testing to a multiprocessor Sun for deployment it's pretty linear.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Borland are also previewing a Java 2 JIT
x 1.html
http://www.borland.com/about/press/1999/jitlinu
which can be downloaded
So, ZDNet Labs, this would be that central repository of patches you were looking for? Oh, wait, let me jump to the Office page to get those patches, then the IE 5 page...
--
If you really want the URL of a Java application of relative complexity, try:
FreeBuilder - An IDE in Java.
Argo/UML - A UML editor with cognitive support
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
He says "usually",not "always" and I agree.
And dont come mentioning names of programmers, do you think Joy and Gosling are idiots?
---> Did you know Linux stands for Linux Is Not UniX ?
now, now kit, where can you obtain a fully compliant JVM from Transvirtual?
I can appreciate Transvirtual's need to make a buck just like the rest of us. However, Microsoft's prime objective was to sabotage Java. It is unfortunate that the otherwise decent folks at Transvirtual were sucked into Microsoft's game. (Analogies could include black actors playing stereotyped roles or Soviet-puppet leaders in east Europe.) The unfortunate result is the spread of Microsoft's pollution in the world of Java programming.
Sun also has to make a buck. However, as I see it, Sun has a history of making a buck by giving the world new and useful technologies. This is in contrast to Microsoft's history of disabling and destroying new and useful technologies, like CORBA. (This is why Microsoft is the devil.)
Sun has to walk a fine line between too open and too closed regarding Java. If too open, Java fragments. If too closed, Java withers. It is certainly debatable as to whether or not Sun is following the right path. Many, such as HP and yourself, portray Sun as Java control freaks. And I admit, you are in a better position to judge than I am.
But to me, it looks like they have done a reasonably good job shepherding Java. The rate of progress in terms of functionality, stability, and performance has been tremendous over the past four years. The documentation is comprehensive, the tools are free, and the source is available.
Maybe I'm naive, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if, when Java stabilizes over the next few years, that Sun hands off the responsibility for Java to some standards body like ANSI. Let's not forget some of Sun's other contributions like NFS. Let's also not forget that Sun is primarily a hardware company.
Which is in line with what I said (a couple of posts above) about most prgrams being I/O bound more often than CPU bound -- most GUIs spend the majority of their time waiting for input. Of course, fast or no, I'd still like to see cleaner redrawing -- I often have windows that aren't redrawn because some action is being performed. (Yeah, I know I could start the action off in its own thread, but sometimes that's overkill...)
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okay but they havel ike 90% marketshare on the client - not supporting that would be suicide (you think sun LIKES windows???)
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Both Japhar and GNU Classpath are active projects. Japhar could use more really good active developers, but the same is probably true for Classpath.
Read Sun's Java licenses the next time you download J2EE. The act of making a java library that has, say, the EJB API infringes on their intellectual copyrights. Sun will have to test this in court eventually. If Java ever does succeed financially - I suspect they will.
since when was Bjarne a Linux user?
okay so now can you anti-sun bigots quit whining? obviously sun is nervous about linux threatening solaris but this is a good step, especially in light of jarkarta being released recently. linux and java should be friends - its a good match and hopefully this is just the first step in their collaboration.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Listen to yourself:
(This is why Microsoft is the devil.)CORBA will implode under its own weight without Microsoft's help.
I didn't know that Bjarne Stroustrup was a Linux developer.
No wonder Java has been so underwhelming... the
only Linux JIT was released for the PPC only...
Just because they stipulate that they own the spec, which they do, by copyrighting it, doesn't mean they don't make it freely available for anyone to use and implement. You can copyright something you GPL, just as you can release something that is yours under multiple different licences.
Technically, the Volano tests were conducted on Kaffe 1.0b4, not 1.05. Among the release notes, Kaffe claims the new JIT "improves raw execution speed by a factor of up to 3". It also uses native Linux pthreads, which should be beneficial to real-world multithreading. And then benchmarks are benchmarks... "benchmarketing" should be avoided on both sides.
At any rate, given significant changes to the JVM and threading model, the Volano results aren't totally applicable.
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Maybe that's just the price you pay for the chains that you refuse.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
It's been a sick joke that the best java platform was windoze. Time to bring it on home.
Ultimately market forces will decide if people want Sun's implementation of Java, or a Java superset offered by Transvirtual. That's the beauty of free enterprise.
John's views on this is expressed in his .plan. If it is fast enough he'll do it. Check out the Java 3D/2D/advanced imageing.
#=-weo-=#
Yet one more motivation for opening up Java for real.
I believe that IBM's support of Java is highly unlikely becuase I recently spent the summer at a large IBM shop (CICS and COBOL-based) doing Java-based programming. We wanted to take some of the CICS-based processing and change them to a Java EJB architecture. Whenever we tried to get a straight answer out of IBM, they dragged their feet and gave us the run-around.
They first said that it was easy to use Java on the OS/390 (err, MVS...) and CICS. Understand that there were thousands of legacy COBOL programs and CICS transactions that we could not afford to break in switching over to a new architecture. The Java implementation would also have to talk to our databases (ancient VTAM) in order to maintain legacy conversion. But, we asked IBM for an example on how to do this. They could not provide one. We then asked for when Java would even be available as a CICS language (write the Java base and have a CICS-transaction wrapper). Well, in order to do this, IBM said that we needed to write a C-wrapper around the Java code so that our legacy COBOL code could continue to talk to the functions (i.e. COBOLJava is not supported). Not an acceptable answer. We went around and around while we got shuffled from division to division. No concrete answer ever appeared from IBM. We finally came to the realization that IBM wants nothing to do with Java... Any solutions would have to be off-the-shelf (and not IBM).
The poor guy who was talking with IBM kept trying and got the run around. One day, he'd tell his bosses that we can do it, the next, he'd have to report that IBM said it couldn't be done.
That said, I would not be shocked to see IBM support it in their lower-level servers, but from my experience this summer, they do not want anything to do with Java on their enterprise-class mainframes.
Justin
Mu. P.S. The address you see is real. =)
VNC has a client written in Java: http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
What with Sun releasing a Java2 compliant JDK for Linux, what will happen to the Blackdown efforts in this area?
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like Bjarne Stroustrup? like Alex Stepanov? Your response is ridiculous, just like all your others. Guess thats why you're at ufl.
Oh, and - It's about freakin' time :)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
That statement in itself is quite demonstrative of your own skill level.
Or maybe you know more about programming than Bjarne Stroustrup, who has been an active critic of Java (or is he a "FUDMesiter"?)
This would be very nice if it's true. Unfortunately, about 50% of the promises we hear about Java turn out to be greatly exaggerated, or vapor. (I say this as a Java programmer, and strong advocate) I'd really like to see Linux become a strong Java platform, as this would make writing software for Linux much less of a "?" Imagine writing a piece of software that runs both on Windows and Linux, and the same code runs better on Linux, and is kludgy on Windows... Wouldn't that be a thrill! :)
I have to disagree - I would rather have Java closed without comprimises than open with such glaring, crippling comprimises.
When it comes to licenses, I'm a stickler - it has to jive with the open source model certification.
Otherwise, you get on a slippery slope...with virtually closed licenses proclaiming to be open.
It seems to me that this setup -- Linux and Java2 -- is ideal for embedded systems and variegated non-computery apps. No mench was made of this in the report, though; so either the didn't bother or I'm deeply misinformed. Which is it, I wonder?
I was also surprised by the anti-NT stance the story takes; it's and IDG story after all. Have I been misjudging them?
Okay, so that was questions rather than statements. Sorry. Won't happen again.
That's typically what people in here decry - the fact that there is so much hype for so little delivery.
We don't just jump on Java because applets have failed (although thats an obvious one) - but more because Sun is repositioning Java in a new direction every other day. XML, Middleware, my dishwasher (Jini)...no tool can satisfy all these diverse needs as easily as Sun would have you believe.
Can Linux developers and Java developers stop fighting now?
Transvirtual and the Kaffe Core Team have released Kaffe 1.0.5 (finally!). It's got a new JIT, new processor ports, a clean-room RMI implementation, kernel threads, and much more. For more information see http://www.kaffe.org/
Transvirtual Technologies, Inc. today released Kaffe OpenVM 1.0.5, the only complete Java implementation available with a true Open Source license.
The release heralds a major improvement in the reliability and performance of open source Java implementations. Tests conducted with various Open Source server side Java applications, including the popular Apache/JServ webserver and the Enydra Java/XML Application Server, demonstrate Kaffe out performs its Java Linux rivals by as much as 300%. Kaffe also proves more reliable than other Java implementations which simply hang when running under heavy load.
Transvirtual targets Linux as their primary server-side, desktop and embedded environments. Kaffe, developed using the Open Source model, once again demonstrates how Open Source can offer a better, cheaper, faster and more reliable product than proprietary alternatives.
This new release of Kaffe also offers a number of new features, including:
* Bundling of the KJC Java compiler from Decision Management Systems (http://www.dms.at/kopi) - a complete JDK 1.2 Open Source compiler suite.
* A complete Remote Method Invocation implementation written in collaboration with the GNU Classpath project (http://www.classpath.org).
* Support for the the popular Cobalt Network Web Servers.
* Support for the MIPS and StrongARM processors (Kaffe already supports Pentiums, Sparcs, Alphas and Motorola processors).
For more details on Transvirtual Technologies see their web site.
For more details on the Kaffe Open Source Project see The Kaffe Project Web Site.
All names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Bruce Perens.
The groups you mention will always be playing catch up with bogus reverse engineering efforts.
Java can also be natively compiled, though there are few available compilers (commercial or otherwise). As a compiled (or JIT-compiled) language, the major speed bottleneck is garbage collection -- performance is comprable to C/C++ with a garbage collection package.
Of course, the AWT package (for graphics) is not particularly impressive, either in speed or in basic window management such as redrawing.
Also, remeber that execution speed is not the only measure of a program. Java is easier to write and maintain than the C variants (from anecdotal evidence). From personal experience I tend to agree -- I know C++ better, but I'm still faster to develop and debug in Java. Most programs do not use the CPU 100% of the time anyway; there is often some I/O bottleneck.
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End-of-Thread
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
This is just vapor. Guess what? IBM, Inprise, and Transvirtual have DELIVERED java on linux. OK, Inprise is really just a JIT for Blackdown. But it's something, and it's commercial. Sun is blowing smoke in the hopes of taking the wind out of their sails. Disgusting. Sun becomes more like Microsoft every day. And why not? What business would not want success like that? Keep your eye on the sparrow...
How can they feel the rain but not know of the flood?
You can download the Borland JIT, free, here. We measure it to be 30% faster than then JIT included in the current JDK 1.2 for Linux.
Huh? Java can use either native threads or green threads. It depends on your JVM (or in some cases how you start the JVM). It sounds like you haven't researched threads under Java--posting without knowing the facts can be a dangerous proposition.
For Solaris, Sun has a web page describing the threading options at http://java. sun.com/products//jdk/1.3/docs/tooldocs/solaris/th reads.html that could be helpful. I haven't looked for pages about threads on other operating systems.
My guess would be that they are probably counting on having the best Java tools. Also, with a flattened software landscape that they essentially control, it will be easy for all of the shops using NT to move on over to SUN hardware for better performance.
It would be better to keep the platform dependence part of things hidden inside the JVM/JIT. Sun, the people who build the machine and are intimately familiar with its capabilities, should do the performance tweaking for you inside of the JVM.
I suppose people won't mind too much if I use this place to point out that 'better than' is the correct spelling.
It makes sense for Sun to push Java on all the low end platforms. Since there are invariably parts of the business that do not run on Java, it is clear that people could migrate to Sun hardware/Solaris/Java more easily from Linux/Java than from NT/Java simply because Linux shares a common Unix denominator with Solaris.
I wish Java (with IBM's latest JIT technology) running on a Pentium III with 256 Megs of RAM could run as fast as compiled C code on a Pentium 60. But, I guess I'm just talking crazy talk. Please refute this by posting a URL of a Java wordprocessor or spreadsheet or any application of comparable complexity - something I can actually run - not some in-house mythical application. (Also, spare us the "my in-house Java servlet does so and so")
Well, you are certainly free to do that.
You do realize, however, that now that you let the cat out of the bag, we'll never need any benchmarks again. I mean, geez, we've got Kernighan and company writing this one algorithm that'll tell us all about what language is fast and what is not.
I'll have to remember to send a thank you note to Brian.
TowerJ also appears to be proprietary; at least there's no mention of any sort of source licensing. And without JDK 1.2 support (especially java.security.*), I don't see the point.
The reverse of "isn't slower" is "is slower"; "isn't slower" is equivalent to "equally fast or faster". Boolean Logic 101.
I tried to be friends with Sun.
But Sun doesn't share his toys with me.
I share my toys with him.
I Thought we should get together, so big bully bill doesn't kick our butts.
But Sun has ignored my requests. In fact, with some of his toys like java, he shares with the bully(who Sun claims to hate), but not with me.
That hurt.
-Linux
True, that's the only thing i hate about it. But then, if all you develop is components, it doesn't really matter.
I'm generally using Java as a replacement to VC++/MFC and VB, so I'm not particularly worried about Swing. WFC is quite fast (considering it's just wrapped ActiveX controls).
I'm betting that MS won't include a Swing form builder in VJ++ 7, but will rather including AFC (Application foundation classes), which IMHO look and work much better than swing. They're also written in 100% java, and have all the windows type functionality that swing lacks. (someone needs to teach sun about GUI design).
Can you post the input data too? And the perl version? It's trivial to make modifications to this Java code to speed it up by 5-10 times.
This code doesn't prove anything about Java's execution speed. It just proves that buffered I/O is more efficient than reading a byte at a time.
Any Java programmer who has more than a few months experience will immediately spot the
problems.
1) Doesn't use buffered I/O at all. A trivial one line fix adding either BufferedReader or BufferedInputStream would boost speed tremendously.
2) Usage of StreamTokenizer on an interactive stream. A bug in JDK1.0-1.2.1
http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugPara
3) Usage of synchronized Vector and Hashtable operations instead of ArrayList and HashMap.
4) Usage of StreamTokenizer! Use BufferedReader and indexOf() or StringTokenizer instead.
Like Linux vs NT, let's not post "cooked" or "biased" benchmarks. The only real way to run these sorts of benchmarks is to have a contest between C++, Java, Pyhton, Perl, and C coders, and have the final result judged on speed of execution, speed of development, clairity, and ease of reuse and maintainability.
Actually, I think most experienced server programmers are already well versed in COBOL, RPG, or Smalltalk.
C++ on the business enterprise server? Sure, it exists, but, uh, it didn't really work out too well. That is why this Java thing is pretty popular... it's the successor to the server-side languages that DID work. [Though i'd argue that the successor to Java should ironically be Smalltalk , but, that's for another time]
-Stu
Java makes so many idioms so much easier I find this very hard to believe. Between debugging dangling references (and myriad other forms of "undefined behavior" that may or may not become obvious), coping with undeclared exceptions, figuring out how much of the ISO spec your vendors bothered to support, rolling your own garbage collection and serialization and finalization and reflection, having to shackle yourself to proprietary interfaces for threading and GUI and databases and crypto and messaging, and a total inability to run untrusted code, I don't see how you could possibly come out ahead.
And Microsoft makes MSIE for MacOS. What's your point? (I'm looking forward to J++ for Linux and BeOS).
try NetBeans running the IBM JDK 1.1.8.
It's a decent speed.
for compiled Java code, try Borland JBuilder... it's a memory hog, unfortunately.
-Stu
Or, more likely in Sun's mind, start off on a linux box and move to Sun hardware in a year or two...
Which numbers? Again, the ones on that same page showing Java faster than C++? If you accept that test as a definitive test of Perl vs. Java in every and all cases, then you also accept those C++ vs. Java numbers for any and all cases? Enough hot air, show us some more numbers, real numbers.
But C++ doesn't define those libraries! You get libc, iostreams, and STL, and that's it. Assuming your compiler vendor even managed to keep up with the Standard. Everything else is proprietary and probably expensive, and you have to hope your vendor feels like supporting all the platforms (and compilers!) you'll ever want.
You mean the one where a C++ implementation on a Pentium II ran the test 2 seconds slower than Java on a Pentium II? C'mon. The book is, as much as anything, about applying intelligence to the practice of programming, about making informed choices, about choosing the right tool for the job. The chapter is about how one goes about factoring performance issues into the choice of language, and so on, for a given task. As for the Markov run you cite, read the "Lessons" section again, and then again. (As for the run's value as any kind of meaningful benchmark, note that specific details of the implementations used are not provided.) If this is all you have then you're correct, talk really is cheap.
DOM? Available via IBM, Sun, Docuverse, Oracle, etc. All Java. Only C++ DOM implementation I know of is in Mozilla
What about MSXML and MSHTML? Microsoft had a DOM out long before java implementations...IE4, IE5.
I think you'll find MS are very quick implementing various technologies - and yes, all in C++.
All that aside, I think Java is a wonderfully elegant language. As soon as I get my hands on a nice free native compiler for NT, it's my language.
Why? Because, while Sun wants people to be able to leave M$-land, they want them to leave it for Sun-land, and that generally doesn't mean going to Linux.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
maybe i'm clueless here (well probably), but i've heard about jdk1.3's performance being above the performance of 1.2, on the client side especially. The question I have is why don't they just skip porting 1.2 and port 1.3? And why doesn't IBM just skip a few versions too?
I don't think it will happen (I would like for it to happen), Sun hasn't really done anything for the linux community. The released a sorta free version of solaris and someone came up with an app that will run linux apps under solaris but they don't really seem to want to work in the linux world. Can anyone tell what they've released that is Linux based?
:-> ).
Of course I could just be too paranoid but I doubt it. Lots of folks see MS as the big evil threat but I think that Sun is also doing stuff, just not as obvious...
And remember that MS doesn't have the large system market, those are solaris machines we're going up against when Linux scales better. (And I can get a 16 processor AMD card
Now if I could just figure out IBMs motives..
bobm
IMHE(xperience), the programmer resources are vastly more expensive than the iron (if they are not then your dollars are being spent in the wrong places -- or you have management which excels in getting great programmers for cheap prices (in which case they aren't getting as good a deal as they think)). Re-engineering code for a move to a new platform because you NEED to move to the new platform is very expensive.
Good management will hire good people to do it right the first time (portable, with the right algorithms, and rock solid code) and deploy it on the right systems with an eye towards potential changes in platforms down the road.
One might argue that isolating platform-dependent code into its own "module" (depending upon what a module is in your language of choice) is the solution -- your server-dependent tweaks go there, and that's what changes in the future. Point taken, but then why are we arguing about not using Java then: that's exactly what JNI was designed for.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
Reason being, we deploy Oracle Applications Release 11.0, as do thousands of other enterprise companies, and thier is no way for clients to currently connect as there is no good java VM nor is there a working plugin.
amazing alot of enterprise features need java, a pure java vm would make it easier for Veritas to port its file systems & management software over, oracle applications could work, and just a bunch of business reporting and system software could fall in.
Can't wait! i'd say in the next 6 months, linux will have a system with all the features, and be able to innovate more instead of play catchup.
ignore the last sentence. and i'm referring to ibm in the one before that.
I have been steadily converting my old code to java so that I can reach a greater audience. For most apps, LudicrousSpeed is a small trade for cross-compatibility. The process of writing once and running anywhere has worked flawlessly for me - I'm not a big developer but the niche seems to be growing - check out jars.com
too much caffine. sorry.
In terms of academia and research, if you look at the IETF and W3C, almost all "new" protocols start out with Java prototype implementations. This is particularly true of the W3C. Jigsaw, XML, XSL, P3P, SVG,
If you look at commercial websites, E-Trade and Datek come to mind, you'll see Java on the backend.
My own free pop/webmail/antispam service msgto.com) uses Java for everything, JSP, servlets, SMTP, POP server, etc. It's also
faster and more responsive than Hotmail.
Yesterday, two spammers took "revenge" on our site by redirecting spam bounces to my site. In a
10 hour period, about 1 million bounced messages were received and discarded on a lowly dual-processor Solarisx86 box. Even now, we are getting about 10 messages per second but 'top' shows only 10% CPU utilization for the JavaVM and 30M memory used. Java definately scales.
Solarisx86 was used for only two reasons. One, when development was started, JDK1.2 wasn't available on Linux, and our servers use JDK1.2 heavily for its new garbage collection/memory management features and fine grained security.
Second, Solaris can scale to thousands of threads across multiple processors. Only TowerJ on Linux allows massive numbers of threads (by not using kernel threads), and Java's I/O mechanism relies on launching large numbers of threads. But TowerJ is not JDK1.2 compliant: bummer! Otherwise, I would love to have a bunch of rackmounted VA Research boxes.
The only place Java really failed was on the desktop application area. But I'm of the opinion that the general trend is that we are moving away from desktop applications and more towards web-based applications. So in a sense, most new desktop apps will fail, regardless of the programming language they are written in, and especially those that try to compete with areas Microsoft dominates. When was the last "killer-gotta-have-it-client-side app created" I can't think of many besides games, browsers, and other multimedia related utilities.
In the past, if you wanted to manage an address book, or a database, someone would ship you a VB or some other 4GL based app, that displays forms on your desktop and inserts them into the DB. Nowadays, most of these apps can be done on the network. This covers most business uses.
What's left for the desktop apps is multimedia. Music, Games, animation, art.
This Sun/IBM announcement is great news. I only wish that IBM would come out with a JDK1.2 compliant VM, because IBM seems to be alot better at optimizing VMs.
-Ray
Can you get NetBeans to load?
I installed the 1.1.8 final for win32 and Linux. The win version runs Netbean 2.1.1 fine, but the Linux version won't.
Have I installed wrong? Help.
Most non-trivial apps that use Swing will probably have to go through some contortions to avoid bugs in certain platforms' implementations (I know we did), but that doesn't make them platform-dependent.
Java can run untrusted code. IMHO this is far and away the most important idea to come along in years, more so than objects, and hardly anyone else is even trying to pull it off (I've heard Perl is, but how in the world would you verify that mess?)
I don't think it'll ever happen, but J++ just rocks :D~~~~.
Instant compiling...takes 2 seconds, not 20 seconds to compile tens of classes.
Intellisense, detects installed packages and lists methods and properties as you type etc etc.
Hell, intellisense even extends to javadoc blocks in java, so you type @ and it'll like @param @comment etc etc.
By "got rid of pointers" they really mean pointer arithmetic and type punning. Most of the undefined behavior, in other words.
I fixed up the code a bit (I assume that there were supposed to be a less-than sign in all the for loop comparisons?), then compiled it and converted it to use the new Collections code and fixed the problems with deprecations. I fed an English-Latin dictionary I had on hand (wc says it's 8340 lines and 41178 words). The revised code is posted at the end of this message, but to start with here are the timings (all on a P450 in Win98 using the Sun VM) all timed with the Cygnus "time" utility, which works pretty much like the unix time command. I took the average over a number of runs to get these numbers, but they are still rather rough.
// size of prefix
// "word" that can't appear
// key = Prefix, value = suffix ArrayList
// initial prefix
// Chain build: build State table from input stream
// remove default rules // turn on all chars // except up to blank
// Chain add: add word to suffix list, update prefix
// Chain generate: generate output words
// NPREF adjacent words from input // for hashCode()
// Prefix constructor: duplicate existing prefix
// Prefix constructor: n copies of str
// Prefix hashCode: generate hash from all prefix words
// Prefix equals: compare two prefixes for equal words
// maximum words generated
Jdk 1.1.8:
Original Code - 7.30 seconds
Revised Code - 9.23 seconds
Jdk 1.2.2 (Current production release)
Original Code - 5.05 seconds
Revised Code (com.sun...collections) - 5.38 seconds
Revised Code (java.util collections) - 5.0 seconds
Jdk 1.3 (Beta release)
Original Code - 3.79 seconds
Revised Code (com.sun...collections) - 4.40 seconds
Revised Code (java.util collections) - 4.20 seconds
Analysis:
This surprised me a bit. As seen above, my "enhancements" actually slowed down the program a bit! I think this might be partly due to my replacing the for loops and get(int) calls with iterators, which is easier on the coder but didn't lend itself much to JIT based enhancements. This goes to show that no matter how smart you think you've been, you should always run an optimizer over your code from time to time and figure out why it is slow in some areas you would not expect slowness...
It also seems to show that syncronized calls are not really hurting us much, though that might be reading too much into the results.
But what should be very obivous and exciting (nad even quite relevant to this article) is the DRAMATIC speedup from the 1.1.x VM to the 1.2 or 1.3 VM!! About a factor of two in this case. I think that should help demonstrate why we want a stable 1.2 VM on Linux quickly.
Here's the code for those interested - note that to use the 1.1 collections package you just need to import com.sun.java.util.collections.* at the top of the code. That's how easy it is to switch upwards as well, everyone should start using the new collections package right away!
----------------------
/* Copyright (C) 1999 Lucent Technologies */
/* Excerpted from 'The Practice of Programming' */
/* by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike */
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
class Chain3 {
static final int NPREF = 2;
static final String NONWORD = "\n";
HashMap statetab = new HashMap();
Prefix3 prefix = new Prefix3(NPREF, NONWORD);
Random rand = new Random();
void build(InputStream in) throws IOException
{
Reader r = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(in));
StreamTokenizer st = new StreamTokenizer(r);
st.resetSyntax();
st.wordChars(0, Character.MAX_VALUE);
st.whitespaceChars(0, ' ');
while (st.nextToken() != st.TT_EOF)
add(st.sval);
add(NONWORD);
}
void add(String word)
{
ArrayList suf = (ArrayList) statetab.get(prefix);
if (suf == null) {
suf = new ArrayList();
statetab.put(new Prefix3(prefix), suf);
}
suf.add(word);
prefix.pref.remove(0);
prefix.pref.add(word);
}
void generate(int nwords)
{
prefix = new Prefix3(NPREF, NONWORD);
for (int i = 0; i nwords; i++) {
ArrayList s = (ArrayList) statetab.get(prefix);
if (s == null) {
System.err.println("Markov: internal error: no state");
System.exit(1);
}
int r = Math.abs(rand.nextInt()) % s.size();
String suf = (String) s.get(r);
if (suf.equals(NONWORD))
break;
System.out.println(suf);
prefix.pref.remove(0);
prefix.pref.add(suf);
}
}
}
class Prefix3 {
public ArrayList pref;
static final int MULTIPLIER = 31;
Prefix3(Prefix3 p)
{
pref = new ArrayList(p.pref);
}
Prefix3(int n, String str)
{
pref = new ArrayList();
for (int i = 0; i n; i++)
pref.add(str);
}
public int hashCode()
{
int h = 0;
Iterator i = pref.iterator();
while ( i.hasNext() )
{
h = MULTIPLIER * h + i.next().hashCode();
}
return h;
}
public boolean equals(Object o)
{
Prefix3 p = (Prefix3) o;
Iterator i = pref.iterator();
Iterator i2 = p.pref.iterator();
while ( i.hasNext() && i2.hasNext() )
{
if (!i.next().equals(i2.next()))
return false;
}
return true;
}
}
class Markov3 {
static final int MAXGEN = 10000;
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException
{
Chain3 chain = new Chain3();
int nwords = MAXGEN;
chain.build(System.in);
chain.generate(nwords);
}
}
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sun publishes a freely-available spec for Java, with a trademark and certification ("100% Pure Java"). As far as I can tell, anyone is free to define and implement a variation as long as they don't call it Java. If you're thinking of the Microsoft suit, Sun is alleging they signed a contract agreeing to implement Java as specified and then broke that contract. That they may have used source licensed from Sun to do it (possibly against the terms of that license) clouds the water further.
Of course, that is thier task to try and make Solaris the biggest baddest thing you can get, so at some point you say "I really have enough load on this box to need the reliability and pure hugeness of a sun E10^30 box". What's wrong with that? The fact is that you can also decide that that HPUX 10^30 box might be as good for you, and it will still work as an EJB solution. Or you might find IPlanet a nightmare to work with, and decide to switch to another web server... it doesn't matter as long as you've not strayed from the EJB standard.
Where you might argue with more force (or at least as much force as an AC argument can have) is to say "Sun will try to always produce Java features quickly enough that only Solaris can have a good VM and thus people will want the Sun box". Now that might be closer to the truth, but there are enough other people producing good VM's (IBM, Kaffe) and working with Sun in specifying standards that I just don't buy that argument as working for Sun even if that is their plan.
So I guess my stance on that would be that even if you are correct and Sun has an evil plan in mind, that it won't work anyway so it doesn't matter - the programmers always win in the end. I personally don't think Sun has an evil plan so much as it wants to promote UNIX in general.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It continued to be such a joke and a failure on the client side for so long that they had to play up this server side story for it. They've completely lost sight of what Java was going to do for them.
There was once a coherent strategy in pushing Windows off the desktop in favor of thin-clients, but now, well, it's hard to imagine that you could field a thin-client that could compete with commodity thin-client hardware based on PC components. So, even if, and it's a HUGE if, you could displace Windows (and Linux) on the desktops, you'd still have to talk to PC hardware being used as thin-clients. Seems like a win for Intel or StrongArms maybe, but not for Sun.
So, Sun turns toward the server and middleware for Java dominance. This seems like a move of desparation, to show SOMETHING for their Java investment. If they succeed at flattening the server side with write-once-run-anywhere Java applications, they will have succeeded in commoditizing the server side.
In such an environment, you'll have IBM, HP, Windows NT and some large number of commodity server Java boxes (made in the far east) to compete against. Why would Sun, who have done so well in differentiating themselves on the server side with the best compilers, best RAS, most scaleability want to flatten out the software landscape? It just doesn't make sense from the standpoint of strategy.
Sun is being pulled around by the nose by a Java Strategy that's taken on a life of it's own. They pay $500,000,000 for the world's most popular Java application (StarOffice, which BTW uses C/C++ on the server side) only to give it away apparently in a desparate attempt to legitimize Java on the desktop. They now have to support the development of Java on their biggest up-and-coming competitive environment, Linux, to make sure that the phenomenal growth of Linux doesn't marginalize their precious Java. It seems crazy.
At the end of the day, what large server side applications will be written entirely in Java? All of those systems will have working C/C++ compilers, after all. With C/C++ you should be able to get much greater performance, stability, more immunity to environmental changes, less developmental headaches (no nervously watching evolving Java standards) and more qualified programmers (most good Java programmers are good C++ programmers, but not vice versa).
I can see Java used like stored DB procedures, and for various kinds of utility programs, middleware glue, quick projects, you know, all those things that Perl does quite adequately already, but take over the server side? How? If anybody dares to field a commercial package written in Java, someone else could beat them up with one written in C/C++.
This is the essential point that people don't seem to understand about C/C++. Your operating systems are written in them for a reason. Because your operating systems are written in them, they will always be the most stable and mature compilers available. Because this is true pretty much everywhere, they will be the standard in portability. Maybe not the kind of VM portability where you can compile it here and it will migrate over to execute somewhere else, but what does that buy you over just having good C/C++ compilers everywhere (which you already do, see above).
Java is probably a better language than C++ because of garbage collection alone (and there are other significant advantages), but you need more than just better to displace a truly ubiquitous language like C/C++.
From my perspective, I see far more developers using Java than users for the forseeable future.
When some wide-eyed Java fanatic tries to tell me that everyone will be using Java next year, I'm reminded of the Amway guy who told me 10 years ago that I could be making $90,000/yr. in just 90 days with Amway, much more in 6 months. I told him to go away and come back in 90 days if he was making $90,000/yr. Needless to say, he wasn't. Java was supposed to be really big next year for the last 3 years now. It's getting tired.
Weren't we supposed to be using Java for SOMETHING by now? People using the Hot Java browser, raise your hands! Let's see, it's not good for browsers, nobody would dream of writing an RDBMS like Oracle in it and in the middle, it competes with Perl, Python, C/C++ and Tcl/Tk. Seems like a squeeze to me.
I see where Lotus got out of the Java client business just the other day. Corel got out awhile back too. StarOffice and their free product is not much of a showcase of a vibrant Java marketplace.
Don't point me at Java support in Oracle or Java support in some ORB or another. All of those environments have quite stable and working C interfaces too, thank you. Show me large numbers of users using Java day in and day out. I bet those same users use about 20 times more C/C++ in their OS alone to support this one app. For every one user who is using a Java app today, I'll give you 50 VB/VBA users and 100 users of apps written in C/C++. There may be growth in Java today, but is it like the growth of Linux where almost no Java is used?
I'm not a Sun hater, nor am I anti-Java. I really like Java as a language. I was turned off years ago by it because I didn't want to jump on while they were changing it so rapidly and it seems that it's just now starting to stabilize.
Maybe Java will be really big someday, but I don't see that someday from where I stand.
Before I switched over to all Java development, I was really well versed in C and C++. I once worked on a large product that had the same C codebase that compiled across eight different brands of UNIX systems as well as VAX, VMS, and MPE (Hp3000) systems.
I got to be pretty familiar there with just about every sort of odd cross-platform compatibility problem one could run into.
I also did a lot of C++ work as well, which was great... as long as you use RougeWave collections and DB packages, along with Great Circle or Purify (to make your program stable enough to run without Great Circle).
But there is no way that even at my peak of use of any of these languages, even using Emacs as an editor, that I could approach the speed of Java development. It's not quite as fast as it might first appear as you have to spend a little more time optimizing for performance over other langauges, but you more than make up for the in the stability, portability, readability, and documentation gains you get. I go back to C or C++ when I have to (for instance to write a JNI wrapper for a C or C++ library) but I think you'd have to be mad to try and write some of the software I'm working on now in anything but Java.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I haven't heard anything about GJC (the port of gcc to compile Java and/or Java bytecodes) recently -- isn't it an acceptable alternative to a JIT? On a different topic, has anyone integrated Java with SOAP or XML/RPC? (They're roughly the same thing -- XML/RPC handles RPC in a reasonably portable way, and SOAP extends that to objects in a quite nice way.) -Billy
I have also heard that Java is excellent for generating very high billing rates for contractors and consultants who implement those server-side apps using EJB, CORBA, etc.
The test is based on a Markov chain algorithm - stats on p. 81.
The results are on a 400Mhz PII
C - 150 lines of code, 0.3 seconds to run
Java - 105 lines of code, 9.2 seconds to run
C++/STL/dequeue - 70 lines of code, 11.2 seconds to run
C++/STL/list - 70 lines of code, 1.5 seconds to run
Awk - 20 lines of code, 2.1 seconds to run
Perl - 18 lines of code, 1.0 seconds to run.
Note that Perl performs very well considering how few lines of code it has.
The Java performance is not terribly encouraging (C++ is even worse, considering the pain it takes to write).
Kaffe is small, lean and mean. It is also Open Source - and has immediate bug fixes as opposed to Sun's top-heavy organization.
I followed the link to the cnn story, of course my browser paused for a few seconds with the "Starting Java" message at the bottom.
At least I wasn't running IE.
This is really a sweet development. Currently, some really cool apps (like the jMax sound processing system) have been "ported to Linux" via Java. However, because the best they can do is include instructions for downloading the blackdown port of the JDK in the README, they are very difficult to get working. A decent port like this could pave the way for a Linux JRE which is exactly what we need for end-user applications. The JRE has done much to ease adoption of Java on Win32, for example.
Can your IM do this?
It's much better than blackdown's linux port.
Please note that this person chose to run Solaris so he could run JAVA. Suns write once run anywhere enviroment. This is, I am sure, 100% in line with SUNs plan, for total dominance. If they had wanted to do what they said, then you would be able to run your JAVA setup on any OS, like BeOS, Mac, Linux, WinNT, not have to choose their Solaris. Ppl who vote for JAVA, vote for a domination much worse than M$ could ever invension.
Kaffe is not reverse engineered: it's based on a specification. There is nothing preventing clean-room implementations of the specification.
I often read this question, though i think the answer is obvious:
Java is the most suitable language to write cross-platform Apps.
A cool (& bugfree) implementation of the JVM (which is currently not available) would bring a lot of software to the linux platform.
And even if this software might be commercial (some app's simply don't make fun to produce, so no OS-programmers do them), having a large number of applications is key to Linux's success.
I can't see too much professional-class apps on Linux (though there are some). Development speed of many OS-projects sucks, since they are driven half day due to the lack of giving their creators financial value to live from.
Common Javaisms...
"Java is scalable" - translation: "Java runs slow as hell, so you better have a huge cluster of machines to run your servers on"
"Language X sucks - Java RULES" - translation: "I don't know how to use language X effectively. I am only familiar with Java."
"It's not the Java way of doing things" - translation: "Sun never anticipated this circumstance, so either wait for a JVM bug fix or an official Java API change in a future undetermined release."
Did I miss any?
or how about
"Java is very badly designed, give me perl anyday" - translation - I have never written a program more than five lines long in my life.
"I don't see the point of java when it is closed source, to me it is just like VB" - translation: I have never worked in the corporate world before. I also have never checked to see just what parts of the java specification can be downloaded no-strings-attached from sun's site. I have also never heard of kaffe
"Java sucks, it is slow and crashes" - translation: I think that java and netscape navigator are the exact same thing.
Yes, I remember a discussion about that issue in www.javalobby.org . The C++ server connected to clients which were in turn applets using CORBA. This worked kind of good but had two major flaws.
:)
1) Firewalls
2) ORB init time (at least orbix)
3) Applet/client code was bloated due to CORBA libraries
The new server still uses an ORB to connect to another server, but to talk to clients it uses serialization through servlets and HTTP. This works really well, but when you think about it, the cost of HTTP socket creation all the time could be bad. It turns out that for our application, it is just as good and we solved the firewall and init issues.
In other words the thread per connection problem is not a big issue for us because we don't have "permanent" connection to our clients.
Another advantage is since we are using servlets, thread pooling is done by the servlet engine (in this case Jigsaw) which takes another big head ache out of our hands. We just code "business" logic and it works fine. This is how I wish development was in my future projects
Going back to the servlet/thread issue , I remember a talk at JavaOne about this with a huge game server. You might want to take a look over those slides.
- sigs are for wimps.
My problem with the Transvirtual folks is that they sold their soul to the devil. Microsoft enbraced and extended Java with their own proprietary extensions to the language, including new keywords. Transvirtual accepted money from Microsoft to incorporate Microsoft's extensions into Kaffe. Need I say more?
I don't know. Ask The Hungry Programmers.
Bruce Perens.
actually, randy chapman's work really wasn't that great. I mean, it was really nice of him to do it, but there has been a LOT of changes to java since what, 1.0.2 that he did back in '96?
Secondly, there are a number of compilers that support the full spec. GCC isn't one of them, but nonetheless they're out there. Kai, for example, is one.
As for proprietary interfaces for GUIs, Qt and Gtk-- are quite open. I don't understand your critique here - Java has one GUI, c/c++ has many. I'd rather have choice.
C/C++ aren't perfect, but if you want to write a serious platform - an OS, an RDBMS, your only other choice is assembler - Java isn't even anywhere near being an option.
For people who alreayd know how to deal with c/c++, it would be silly for them to downgrade to a language with demonstrably poorer performance.
Thanks for the hot air. I'll stick with the numbers.
Hope you got some interest out of it, thats a lot of work....
K&R C, I can believe. But there are still proprietary OSes out there whose one-and-only compiler doesn't even grok exceptions, and I'd hardly call that impoverished language C++.
This is a troll, right? C and C++ are half-marked minefields, and the industry has spent the last decade or so proving that getting reasonable robustness with them requires such superhuman diligence that you actually get more money if you don't even bother to try.
Ah yes, the joys of DLL Hell.
Instead you can wistfully watch the evolved C++ Standard and wonder which parts your vendors might bother to support.
This is an artifact of C++ having arisen first. Most good C++ programmers have learned Java for the same reason they'd learned C++ - it's better than what they had before. Most Java programmers who didn't already know C++ are too inexperienced to be good (the rest were doing amazing things in Smalltalk instead).
IMHO the notion of code that's married forever to one machine is the next piece of cultural baggage we're getting rid of, and Java (the first widely-deployed language that can safely receive and run untrusted code from elsewhere) will be the centerpiece.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Mr. Perens is claiming that Kaffe is "300% faster" than some competitors without giving concrete benchmarks or even stating who those competitors are. Obviously you can create a loaded scenario by pitting Kaffe with JIT vs. Blackdown with JIT disabled. Even worse is the AC who claimed that Kaffe could be 2x as fsat as HotSpot.w -10-volano.html
For real, 3rd party benchmarks, check out the Volano report at:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-10-1999/j
In terms of speed, Kaffe rated a 389, while IBM's JDK got a 1770. Yup, the IBM kit was more than 4 times as fast. On top of that, Transvirtual doesn't pass Java compatibility tests, so if you develop on their VM, you have no reason to believe that your code will work on a real JVM.
Open source is not necessarily equal to best of breed.
--JRZ
Any good intro to Java that covers finalizers also mentions System.runFinalizersOnExit (it's deprecated, but it looks safe if you don't call it alongside System.exit). And the best you can do in C or C++ is conservative mark/sweep - you have to keep everything corresponding to any word that might be a pointer, and you can't move anything in case that wasn't a pointer - pitiful next to generational scavenging HotSpot just added to Java. And there's no portable way to enumerate your root set anyway so you have to hope the GC library vendor supports all your platforms. Oh, good luck finding C++ libraries that assume you're using any garbage collector, much less the one you picked.
A glance at the spec shows that C++ has none. Some platforms have a few. If I can't pick one and use it everywhere, what do I get from the choice but trouble?
Blackdown was never afforded the opportunity to let the community loose. IBM is banking on Java because it is the only viable long term language. Linux is doing things right and coming along nicely. Palm has a kvm. Ever seen the Java Expert System Shell (JESS), Java3D, Swing, or servlets? Anyone who doesn't see Java in their future is looking the other way because they're afraid to keep up with the tide. Regardless of how much SUN supports Linux, they realize Linux will not go away. In the end, it benefits them to have a large Java developer base. If SUN doesn't stabilize Java on Linux, somebody else surely will.
As a developer, just learn it. As a designer, just go with it. I can virtually guarantee that you'll look back a year from now and be glad you're still with the tide. You may have been able to make excuses 3 months ago, but it will soon be too late to keep ahead. In this industry, a couple months of making excuses can concede much too much advantage.
Is that with hotspot installed?
Jilles
Microsoft didn't implement DOM, they implemented OM. (without the D) At the time IE4/5 came out, DOM wasn't a proposed or draft standard.
Many things changed between DOM working drafts, such as the NodeIterator iterfaces.
if you look at MSXML, it specifically calls it OM for ObjectModel and is different than DOM.
Same thing goes for XML, XSL, etc. Microsoft is good keeping up with drafts, but they are still behind everyone else. The only "near 100%" compliant XSL/XSLT/X-Path processors for instance, are James Clark's.
I've been doing all Java enterprise work for over three years - at first, it was more R&D work with graphical visualization, but for the past few years I've worked on a number of practical Java programs that were deployed to big telecom companies. One was a big application/applett (it ran as either) that was a replacement for and enhancement of of large Powerbuilder application (and don't tell me the world wasn't made more pleasant by the reduction of Powerbuilder apps in the world by one!). It was an MDI Swing app (using Jdk 1.2), and it had to run on P90's... I won't say it was all that fast on a P90, but on a P166 it ran pretty well. That did require some tuning of course, but in the end it ran pretty well and the client was very happy with the results. That just goes to show that people who talk of Java being useless for apps are living back in 1996.
Now I am working on all server side Java stuff. The whole company is doing almost everything in Java, as are many others.
This is not a flavour of the month kind of event, this has been slowly building for a long time and there looks to be no end in sight. A strong VM on Linux means that at any time, you can swap out that Solaris or HPUX or AIX EJB server for a Linux box if it meets your criteria for the hardware you need. It will be the force that finally shakes loose any doubt of Linux being an equal in the corperate world. It's a shame that Java VM development on Linux has been so slow, but at last we are seeing good progress...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"The next implementation if the JVM makes Java run faster than X", where X may be perl, C++, or anything short of microcode.
Most non-trivial programs will run into a platform dependence, especially if they involve applets.
/* Copyright (C) 1999 Lucent Technologies */
// size of prefix
// "word" that can't appear
// key = Prefix, value = suffix Vector
// initial prefix
// remove default rules // turn on all chars // except up to blank
// NPREF adjacent words from input // for hashCode()
// maximum words generated
/* Excerpted from 'The Practice of Programming' */
/* by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike */
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
class Chain {
static final int NPREF = 2;
static final String NONWORD = "\n";
Hashtable statetab = new Hashtable();
Prefix prefix = new Prefix(NPREF, NONWORD);
Random rand = new Random();
// Chain build: build State table from input stream
void build(InputStream in) throws IOException
{
StreamTokenizer st = new StreamTokenizer(in);
st.resetSyntax();
st.wordChars(0, Character.MAX_VALUE);
st.whitespaceChars(0, ' ');
while (st.nextToken() != st.TT_EOF)
add(st.sval);
add(NONWORD);
}
// Chain add: add word to suffix list, update prefix
void add(String word)
{
Vector suf = (Vector) statetab.get(prefix);
if (suf == null) {
suf = new Vector();
statetab.put(new Prefix(prefix), suf);
}
suf.addElement(word);
prefix.pref.removeElementAt(0);
prefix.pref.addElement(word);
}
// Chain generate: generate output words
void generate(int nwords)
{
prefix = new Prefix(NPREF, NONWORD);
for (int i = 0; i nwords; i++) {
Vector s = (Vector) statetab.get(prefix);
if (s == null) {
System.err.println("Markov: internal error: no state");
System.exit(1);
}
int r = Math.abs(rand.nextInt()) % s.size();
String suf = (String) s.elementAt(r);
if (suf.equals(NONWORD))
break;
System.out.println(suf);
prefix.pref.removeElementAt(0);
prefix.pref.addElement(suf);
}
}
}
class Prefix {
public Vector pref;
static final int MULTIPLIER = 31;
// Prefix constructor: duplicate existing prefix
Prefix(Prefix p)
{
pref = (Vector) p.pref.clone();
}
// Prefix constructor: n copies of str
Prefix(int n, String str)
{
pref = new Vector();
for (int i = 0; i n; i++)
pref.addElement(str);
}
// Prefix hashCode: generate hash from all prefix words
public int hashCode()
{
int h = 0;
for (int i = 0; i pref.size(); i++)
h = MULTIPLIER * h + pref.elementAt(i).hashCode();
return h;
}
// Prefix equals: compare two prefixes for equal words
public boolean equals(Object o)
{
Prefix p = (Prefix) o;
for (int i = 0; i pref.size(); i++)
if (!pref.elementAt(i).equals(p.pref.elementAt(i)))
return false;
return true;
}
}
class Markov {
static final int MAXGEN = 10000;
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException
{
Chain chain = new Chain();
int nwords = MAXGEN;
chain.build(System.in);
chain.generate(nwords);
}
}
Now, to debunk some of the other myths you've offered, it would be slightly misleading to say that the W3C is using Java as a first implementation language on new technology. Just go to their site and look around - you'll see thats not the case.
I agree that Java is emerging in more and more places, but it still has serious performance problems, as many benchmarks indicate, and it certainly isn't "everywhere".
>Going back to the servlet/thread issue , I >remember a talk at JavaOne about this with a >huge game server. You might want to take a look >over those slides.
:)
Yup , saw that article in Javalobby too, did that. I am just feeling rather nervous about it since I'm designing a server for my client.
It is done in Java at the moment, but being wary of that issue and the lack of select() in Java, I was considering on reworking it in C/C++.
I'll just remember to ask him not to run the server in Win98....
Check out this Java World article for real benchmarks for a variety of JDKs on Intel hardware. The scalability (page 2) is both interesting and disappointing. The numbers on the Blackdown and Kaffe JVMs really show how badly a new JVM is needed for Linux. --JRZ
What core functionality has changed in the past six months that affects code you wrote six months ago?
Has Japhar been given up for dead then?
> I'm wondering if anyone out there uses Java for
> something useful. Perhaps I sound naive, but
> I've never seen it deployed beyond annoying
> applets or slow as molasses games in COS246
> (Java Programming) And java support in Netscape
> seems to be lacking to put it nicely.
You need to go out more often
We are using Java for rewritting a server from C++ to Java. Why ? Because it's easier to run it in other platforms now (like Linux, and a PC), it's more flexible and has even better performance than the C++ version due to some design changes that are easier to implement and maintain in Java.
> I've done some reading about servlets and
> Jserver pages which seem quite interesting. Does
> anyone have any experience with them or
> experience with gnu-jsp?
Is gnu-jsp still being developed, I tought that project was left in limbo.
For servlets I've been doing a lot of that at work too using the Jigsaw webserver, a good little server that is written in Java and it's easy to embed it in your application.
I might get stoned for saying this here but, we've also replaced a lot of perl code with java/servlet code and the results are really really interesting. Give it a try
- sigs are for wimps.
smaller programs that execute faster. Wow, what a concept....but then again, "MassaCre", you're the same guy who asked why Java wasn't open, so I'll take your remarks as the utterances of a sophomore.
That what i wanted to hear
I wonder why not anyone remember about such things like Python (which also fairly platform independent)
look for sunwjit.so in the JDK 1.2 pre v2 install.
This is largely in line with comments made by others; that programmer resources are more expensive than hardware in the long run. I also believe that the hardware is so changing so quickly that language decisions made on the basis of performance are generally meaningless within a couple of years.
Few big companies are going to build large multi-user applications from scratch; Java is like the "4GLs" in that they have a huge respository of useful things that are just standard. It is better than the 4GLs in that it is faster and more generalised - and it works everywhere.
It is great to be able to combine the two "obvious" (to me anyway) trends of the future, java and linux.
Just MHO of course.
With Mozilla's "Open JVM Integration" we should finally have a good java platform with Linux. I hope this tech is released soon (both Java and Mozilla).
Speaking as a programmer that has been doing a lot of Java development lately, this is very good news. The fact that 'official' Sun blessing has been given to a Java for Linux should help to make Linux more saleable to the PNB types as a Java development and/or deployment platform.
Has anyone used native compiled Java (i.e. machine code - no JVM) to develop Linux/Win/Mac cross platform programs? Any problems using Swing, threads and sockets? What compiler did you use on each platform? Any compiler incompatability issues? Am I right in thinking that gjc only supports Linux of these there platforms?
Don't they have to have made some effort for it to be affected?
It will take them one month to become really good at Java, less than the time taken with the extra work introduced by C++.
Around here, more and more former C++ programmers are flocking to Java.
The article really sounded as though there is a pressing need to support Java better on Linux machines, but for some reason I thought the general feeling among Linux users was that Java is slow and not really as useful as traditional programming languages.
I'm wondering if anyone out there uses Java for something useful. Perhaps I sound naive, but I've never seen it deployed beyond annoying applets or slow as molasses games in COS246 (Java Programming) And java support in Netscape seems to be lacking to put it nicely.
I've done some reading about servlets and Jserver pages which seem quite interesting. Does anyone have any experience with them or experience with gnu-jsp?
suns strategy has been pretty consistent since jdk 1.1. Its just that it takes bit longer than they originally expected.
"That's typically what people in here decry - the fact that there is so much hype for so little delivery."
Those people generally seem to be unaware of anything else but applets. One of the reasons there are so many Java products at this moment is because its a profitable business. I.e. people actually buy and use stuff like JBuilder, Visual Age, etc.
You are right that SUN is repositioning Java all the time. They have to because there's a lot changing. A year ago XML was just a spec. Now it's the latest hype. Java is right in the centre providing tools, parsers etc. I don't think that's bad.
Then Jini, I really like the ideas behind that. Its something truly innovative. It doesn't seem to hurt other things in Java so what's your problem with Jini?
"...no tool can satisfy all these diverse needs as easily as Sun would have you believe"
Sun doesn't want you to believe that. They're offering different versions of their JDK now. A standard version, an enterprise version, a micro edition (coming in five flavors if I remember correctly). Each is targeting a different portion of the market.
I'm sorry the world is spinning too fast for you these days.
Jilles
There has been a JIT around for well over a year. Probably more like 2 years. It's on Blackdown's Java page - 'TYA' is its name.
I would counter that linux is a better match for the multitude of open programming languages out there.
Java is closed, and hence does not mesh well with the general promise of linux - a complete, truly open system.
Linux is focused mainly on Intel hardware, so pushing Linux is pushing Intel, and thats a no-no Why should they care, they have a superb OS and superb hardware that beats everything on the market right now. Linux is a joke compared to the latest and greates Solaris. No volume mangament, no meta devices, no support for more than 4 GB ram, no support for more than 8 processors, very poor SMP scalability, no inbuilt heartbeat/failover clustering, no user process managment, no system partioning (split the system with mem/cpu/disk in serval logical volumes), poor RAID support, no Hot Spare RAID technology, no real POSIX thread inplementation. user-space applications like 'ps' and 'top', etc does not support SMP, no user-space commands for system tuning/statistic managment, poor NFS inplementation. Well, and then you pay $100.000-150.000 for an Sun Enterprise box (like we do) you get the OS for free with the system ofcoz.
I know a lot of /. readers don't like Java for X, Y, or Z reasons, but this is a really REALLY Good Thing (tm).
The direction middleware (such as application servers, transaction monitors, messaging servers, etc) is going is Java, like it or not (I happen to like it quite a bit). Enterprise Java is getting even more hype in these areas than Linux itself *grin*.
As I've personally just been doing an overview of a systems architecture for a large (fortune 50 or so) company's internal functions, I can tell you that Java support is really holding back a lot of the enterprise middleware products that are available for NT, Solaris, AIX, etc. I had to recommend not using Linux because these enterprise applications are not available for Linux. Hopefully, this move from Sun and IBM's great work on Linux JVM's will help to remedy this situation.
Plus, with the Apache Jakarta code finally having dropped (thanks again Sun!) it will be nice to have a fast, stable 1.2 JVM. I've heard that the Blackdown port is relatively stable, but the Volano benchmarks show it to be relatively slow.
No, they are not. However, there are other implementations that are, such as Kaffe.
I have this sneaking suspicion that IBM was the motiviating factor in all of this. I work in/around an AS/400 shop (but I am a web designer) and it seems to me that IBM is pushing Java just as fast as it'll go. Additionally, it makes sense for IBM to pursue this route in terms of client independence. IBM really doesn't have a competitive client to push into the market at this point, so by pushing Java to every other platform, they hedge their bets and can sit back and watch the client wars play out while they focus on the Big Iron behind it all without having to worry quite so much about interoperability problems. My guess is that they will drag Sun kicking and screaming along with this plan through some kind of liscensing deal that we may/may not be privy too. Heaven knows that IBM's patent arsenal affects Sun _somehow_
Dojo: defanging browsers so you don't have to
Are Sun Virtual Machines released as open source? If not, shouldn't we encourage them to do so?
-cf
ah i dunno they're ok guys - talked to one at javaone, and basically his position is that their vm is gpl's so what the hell? if ms wants to pay to have some api's added its not forcing anyone to use them.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
come on bruce, been spending too much time advocating...back to reality now.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Hmmm ... maybe like get a clue.
Boy, are you glad you posted anonymously or what ?
- sigs are for wimps.
I congratulate the Kaffe team, but I have to ask what use is this?
According to the Kaffe website "Kaffe mostly complies with JDK 1.1, except for a few missing parts. Parts of it are already JDK 1.2 (Java 2) compatible."
So we are back where we started. There is no version of Java 2 for Linux (blackdown 1.2 is still beta), and the open source version of java 1.1 has missing parts which could cause unexplained behaviour in your java programs that run fine elsewhere.
So until the open source version of Java can conform to at least Java 1.1, or better yet the far more relevant Java 2, it is not a viable option for real Java development.
(as a side note, what use is a compiler written in Java that is 1.2 capable, but is crippled by the lack of a Java 2 virtual machine?)
One of *MY* main gripes with java is that the core functionality is so twisted. It keeps on changing every 6 months. Sure, languages develope over time, but the current java implementation seems to be a sort of ad-hoc implementation. That said, I'm still rooting for java as the (*cough, cough*) "internet" language. There's not much better stuff on the market, is there?
I (and I'm guessing most developers) have no interest in yet another "we implement whatever we want" JVM. It fairly stupid (to put it mildly) to use an VM that is not fully compliant, because it marries you to that implementation and limits you your ability to run in other platforms.
...
I'm also left wondering about the use of a Java 1.2 capable compiler with a hybrid 1.1/1.2 VM. I must be missing something here
- sigs are for wimps.
This kinda illustrates how JAVA has a strong problem delivering its own promise. It is not intresting, nor good that JAVA can run really fast on one platform but not on others. Why then bother with the jvm sutff, and not just write a native compiler. If SUN takes this route to make various UNIXes the best platform for JAVA, the cross platform aspect of JAVA dies, and so will JAVA. If UNIX programmers shift from C/C++/Perl to JAVA for their programs ok, but it wont have the wide impact, dominating more than M$ ever could, unless they make it run equally fast on all platforms.
Argghh, I love FreeBSD, but these results are shameful...does anyone know anything that can improve performance on FreeBSD?
Sun didn't want anyone to change Java, so that it would be a "write once, run anywhere" language. OK, that's a reasonable goal. But they did that by prohbiting anyone but Sun from making changes in Java. They should have done it by establishing a Java standard, with trademarks attached to it and a certification program, instead of casting the software in concrete and prohibiting any innovation by people outside of Sun. And now, they've lost. Their big expensive lawsuit against Microsoft means nothing, because Microsoft simply bought their Java VM from someone other than Sun.
Bruce Perens.
My issue with the Blackdown port is that, beautifully compliant as it is, it lacks a JIT compiler. My benchmarks make the Kaffe JITC about three times as fast as the Blackdown JDK's interpreter.
With Java designed the way it is, it should be a truly no-brainer hack to graft the Kaffe JITC onto Blackdown. If a hack it would be at all. Perhaps the relative hooks in the JITC should be exposed with CORBA, if they aren't already, that is.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
You are absolutely right, despite other replies being posted. No, Java is not good for writing operating systems and device drivers. No, Java is not good for creating realtime 3D games. But Java is great for business apps. Think of Java as the replacement for COBOL as well as VB. Enterprise Java Beans IS the future of business software.
As far as the various flavors of mini-Java, I have no clue as to how they will fare. And Jini is cool, but it may be ahead of its time. But the importance of these are miniscule compared to the significance of Java in the business world.
I programmed in Java for a couple of years but recently came back to C++. I switched not because I lost the faith, but because I really prefer systems programming to business apps. And while I love being back closer to the hardware, I really miss language. C++ is very powerful, but it's still a kludge. Java is clean and its extensive libraries are powerful, but its still slow and will never be suited to systems programming.
check out the latest tya at ftp://gonzalez.cyberus.ca/pub/Linux/java/ it isn't exactly a stelar performer, but it holds up reasonable well, and is OSS.
Does any one out there really use Gnome or KDE?
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but my PC boots straight into KDE every time I turn it on. I also use Gnome frequently, and especially I use Gnome applications (such as gnorpm and glade) under KDE. I also do it the other way around, i.e., run Gnome as my primary desktop and use KDE apps under gnome. When I want a console, I use one of the many excellent graphical terminal emulators. Only very infrequently do I go "slumming" in text-only mode - it's butt-ugly on my VIAO anyway, and it's scarcely longer to boot into graphics mode than text mode. Half the time is spent waiting for the stupid manufacturer's logo to disappear, anyway.
(BTW, are you sure you should be asking that question in your sig? Too close to flamebait, and it will generate too many off-topic responses - like this one.)
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I wonder if it will be Kestrel (aka JDK 1.3, see JDC's Early Access section. It might require a free registration.) which is AFAIK scheduled for delivery around January-February 2000. Well, the article did say "the latest".
:p
I also wonder who is the first to devise the most insidious and twisted conspiracy theory full of world-eating evil out of that piece of news.
>(8< ~ we come in peace
Also Java program are compiled 2 times. Once when they are turned in to cross platform byte code, then again when the byte code gets executed on the platform. I love programming in the language, as everything is an object and inherites from Object, it makes writing and reading streams easy. Just write or read the object and you have your data back.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Their Java efforts sank when Microsoft hired the
main Java developer who ported the first SDK.
the IBM JIT for its JDK/JVM 1.1.6 for linux, and now 1.1.8 for linux, is an excellent JIT putting Java performance on Linux/x86 on par with the state of the industry JVMs that IBM has brought to Windows and OS/2 (see http://www.ibm.com/java/jdk/118/linux/index.html )
The current 1.2 JVMs for linux aren't really all that good. There are speed problems, functionality problems... a lot of problems. They're certainly not ready for a real deployment in anywhere near a mission critical situation. Fun to play with, but not business ready yet.
Remember that many of the difficulties encountered when porting this around are due to the very SolarisThreading-centric 'reference' implementation provided by Sun -- unless they're willing to do something about that, they're in the same mess that Blackdown/IBM/HP/etc are.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
The IBM JDK does need a kernel 2.2/glibc-2.1-based machine, but if you're "into" Java, you're going to want to be on those versions anyway for the improved native thread support. (read: "working native thread support.")
We'll have to see how things turn out in a few months regarding a Java2 JDK, but I'd put my money on IBM. Sun's good at talking the talk, but IBM has proved themselves to also be good at walking the walk. (And it seems like the poor Blackdown guys have just been getting the shaft...)
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Java is very portable. period.
Didn't you release my previous message at all? I clearly explained why it was deployed on Solaris. My personal development servers are Linux. I used Blackdown's port of the JDK. At the time I developed it, JDK1.2 nor IBM's JDK 1.1.8 wasn't available, I had no choice. Had I developed it 2-3 months later, I may have went with IBM JDK 1.1.8 or TowerJ. The problem was deployment. I couldn't get a great performing Linux VM 6 months ago, and after I moved to JDK1.2, it was still prerelease on Linux. The situation is totally different now. The higher performing VM is TowerJ on Linux. Linux is now the leader. Once it has the best performing JDK1.2, my next round of servers will deploy on Linux.
I suspect that not to far down the line, Sun will give the Linux Java market to IBM. They will push it on Solaris to help sell hardware and push it on Windows to help make licensing money but why would they spend time and money on Linux? Linux developers will not pay their software fees, nor are they likely to buy Sun hardware. This seems similar to Microsofts ignoring the Linux market for its software. I understand not bothering with Office but they are not even bothering with their Server software products. Why not? They see themselves as a Linux competitor. They only came back to supporting the Mac when they purchased a big chunck of the company. It seems that Sun still sees itself as a Linux competitor in the operating systems market.
IBM seems to be embracing Linux and perhaps hopes to become a real player in this market. They seem to understand that it doesn't matter if every computing device on the planet is running Linux... as long as it is on IBM hardware running IBM solutions. I wouldn't be surprised if Big Blue purchased or partnered with a Linux seller and started making an adjusted Linux to replace or be offered instead of AIX, like SGI seems to be doing with Irix. They could shift the money earned from AIX software fees to the hardware cost and Linux support contracts and switch from AIX development on their own to Linux development with a million of their best friends. They are such good friends they work for free! I have no idea why Sun can not see this as IBM (and SGI) can. I don't know why they don't just take a quiet "what and see" stance like HP. Maybe it's because they are really so cocky that they can't fathom Linux ever catching up to Solaris. Pretty soon people will be complaining about the cost of Solaris when buying a Sun box when they are not intending on using it. Meanwhile, friendly sharing between IBM, SGI, and the Linux community will let IBM and SGI concentrate on hardware. This is where they really make money anyway (compared to software fees).
-- soldack
Female Prison Rape in NY
Duh, there's no such thing as a destructor in Java. You mean finalizers. Very, very few classes even need to use finalizers, so it's not a big problem.
Java has one GUI
That hasn't been true for a long time. Get a clue. How about Swing where you have a choice of 2 or 3 and can roll your own UI fairly easily? How about Open Source alternatives to Swing like Kawa or ICE?
Few people should need to write OSs or RDBMSs, there are plenty out there already. Java has never claimed to be able to do everything, so this is a straw man argument. Java is not appropriate for everything, but it is technically superior to C/C++ in many ways - e.g. IMPOSSIBLE to corrupt memory (i.e. using same location for two different variables) using Pure Java code, by the very design of the language, but an easy mistake to make in C.
For people who alreayd know how to deal with c/c++, it would be silly for them to downgrade to a language with demonstrably poorer performance.
Take a look at the real world for one second. Why do so many C programmers also use PERL, even though it's slower?
Female Prison Rape in NY
As it stands, experienced server programmers are already well versed in c/c++ - it would probably take them longer to do it in Java.
Not everyone approaches a project as their first paid job out of school.
Yes.
People around SlashDot seem to want to jump all over Java, somehow equating that the failure of applets (which is what you are talking about) means that Java is a bust.
This is not true. Java is one of the hottest things going in client-server computing and n-tier architectures.
Check out the buzz around EJB, CORBA using Java and (gasp!) DCOM using Java. Have a look at BEA Weblogic, IBM Websphere, etc. These have support for JSP/Servlets, as well as COM/CORBA, load balancing, transaction management, etc.
Java is alive and very well in the post-applet world. Having additional support for Java on Linux (from Sun, IBM or whoever) just allows Linux to start to become a player in this world.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
...and with this new announcement today of a security flaw in Microsoft's VM (haven't seen it posted yet today), it's all the better.