3) Name 1 ISV anywhere in the world developing application software for Netware/Java, that isn't being paid to do so by Novell.
Duh! The whole point of Java is that you develop for Netware, or for any other platform. You develop for standard Java or for J2EE and Netware becomes just one of many commercial or open source app servers that run your code.
J2EE is simply a set of specifications. There are many very widely used open source implementations of all or part of J2EE. Apache's Tomcat for example, or JBOSS. Every time you see a JSP page - that's J2EE.
Anyone who things that J2EE is not experiencing real growth has not looked at the IT job market for years.
Star Office/Open Office will soon be making a serious dent in the MS monopoly. There are a large number of organisations and governments who are either evaluation or installing MS alternatives. Star/Open Office seems to be the main Office suite in these suitations.
There is no "standard" MS Office. Do you mean Office 95? Office 97? Office 2000? Office XP? There are many fundamental differences between these versions, both in terms of user interface and functionality, for example MS Access has been a major headache in terms of database and code upgrading between Office versions.
Every few years an organisation is going to have to retrain its staff, whether or not they stick to MS Office. Any school or collage who teaches or trains for a specific Word processor or spreadsheet is wasting time and resources. I have often found that MSOffice training *reduces* the flexibility of users. Untrained and novice users seem to switch easily between different types of word processors, whereas trained users expect buttons in specific places etc.
Forms, mail merges, standard letters are all there under the AutoPilot.
Open the data navigator and you have tables and queries including QBE grids just like in Access. Reports are now present in OO 1.1.
Users with ZERO training and no experience of Access would find equal problems getting things going. I would suggest that users with zero training should not be doing table design, queries or reports. I know from bitter experience that the results of allowing this are frequently an unmanageable mess.
OO *is* ready to replace MS - I have used it for exactly this in commercial organisations.
Java for Sun may have failed (I don't think it has), but it has not failed for IBM, or Apple, or any of tens of thousands of companies that use it as a development language.
Java IS open, and has ALREADY been ported to just about every OS!
The latest GNU compiler set includes a Java compiler. The spec of the bytecode is available to anyone, and anyone can write a VM to run Java binaries.
There are only two 'closed' parts of Java - you can't officially call your implementation of the VM 'Java' unless it passes Sun's compatibility tests, and you can't officially implement parts of the J2EE spec and call it 'J2EE' without passing Sun's tests and licencing it. But so what? You can call your product anything else you like.... Kawa, Kaffe, Toba, GCJ... whatever!
What do you think would have happened to Java if Sun hadn't controlled it? It would have fragmented like C/C++ into a hundred dialects with a thousand extensions. Instead you can compile java into bytecode and run that on IBM's VM, HP's VM, Apples VM, Sun's VM. That is why Java is one of the most widely used languages in the history of computing.
"Speaking about Java - just admit that Java has failed."
If being the most widely used programming language, and one of the most demanded skills in the software industry is failure, how would you define success?
"But even in the face of this barrage, industry veterans say the company is hardly on the verge of collapse."
"Industry veterans say although Sun has warned of a hefty loss and analysts are calling for drastic changes, the company has viable plans for the future."
Firstly, KDE3 is NOT an overblown file manager. Its a window manager and a software suite. There are thousands of programs written for it, both open source AND commercial.
Secondly, if you want to do design, there are many high-quality programs you can use, especially for CAD. LinuxCAD is superb. For publishing work you can use free packages like Scribus, or go to Adobe for commercial software.
The fact is there are really no alternatives for most people.
This is false. Sit a novice user in front of KDE3 and Open Office on a machine that has been sensibly set up and they will find a familiar interface and will face few cross-training problems. The paradox is that users who are more 'highly trained' tend to find non-MS systems problematic - novices just go ahead and use the system.
Why should the growth of Linux destroy Sun? Sun are not a UNIX company - they are a systems provider. They ship software products, they make a considerable amount of money by licensing Enterprise Java. They make some of the best workstation and server products. Solaris - their UNIX - is simply one part of their package. Linux could well replace it in a few years, in low-end and mid-range servers, but this need not hurt Sun.
But if it's written by a gay guy, then we could have a camp Doctor, who dresses is really stupid clothes and doesn't seem particularly interested in women . ..
This isn't funny, its stupid and offensive stereotyping. Grow up and get a life.
I realise that this is not going to be a popular view, but in my experience, nothing should ever be just 'thrown together' like this. There will inevitably come a point when the system needs to be extended, adapted or integrated with something else. I have spent much of the past few years re-writing a system that was developed as a set of small quick scripts, but ended up unable to scale to the demands of a growing company.
An example of using a scalable system might be a website constructed for $0 using Java Server Pages + struts on tomcat. When the company expands, you can deploy the exact same java binaries on a load-balanced set of Oracle application servers or whatever.
PHP fans might want to take a look at the Java Standard`Tag Library - its not as elegant as PHP in many ways, but its full-features and extensible through cross-platform Java code.
Personally, I will not touch.Net, as it makes no commercial sense to use a proprietary solution when J2EE does the same thing. As J2EE is inclusive - it runs on the same machines as.Net, there is little reason to use.Net for web services.
There are phenomenal resources in space. Some carbon-rich asteriods contain organic compounds and lots of ice. A manned mission to one of these would be inexpensive, as the asteroid could supply fuel, oxygen and water, and there would be only a minor gravity well. Its the ideal base for a space station. Mining missions could be launched to mineral-rich asteroids, also with gravity being neglible. One this is started, the system would be self-funding from the mineral resources obtained.
This would only work as a manned mission - you don't want to end up controlling prospecting and mining robots from earth.
.... Blows Swing away... Then don't use Swing. Use IBM's SWT instead. Its a native GUI library, fully-featured, open source, and available pre-compiled for lots of platforms (OS/X, Windows, Linux etc). Under Windows it allows use of COM/ActiveX etc.
Microsoft's development tools always been good Sorry, this is nonsense. Having dealt with MS tools for nearly 25 years I have found them to often be some of the worst I have ever used. Visual Studio is a catch-up job, replacing truly awful and buggy command-line tools in the 80s and early 90s. Microsoft were one of the last companies to provide development tools for Windows that actually ran under Windows! I have been used to quality systems like Smalltalk IDEs which include integrated class browsers, run-time re-compilation, object inspectors, class and method finders and documentation. I have also been used to small and efficent IDEs such as those provided by Borland/Inprise. Over the past few years I have been supporting users developing in Visual Basic 6, and the whole thing is a mess, to the extent of some Visual Basic programs actually crashing Visual Studio!
MS tools may look pretty, and be easy for beginners to get started, but for professional OOP development they are definitely low-quality.
> Is it faster? No Compared to what? Plain C, compiled by a highly optimizing compiler for a certain platform? No, of course not. JAVA? Maybe. Interpreted languages without bytecode support? Maybe.
There is no reason why a high-quality bytecode-based VM system should not match or even beat optimised plain C, if the bytecode interpreter does run-time profiling and translates bytecodes to native instructions. After all, the VM can find the actual bottlenecks during execution as against the predicted bottlenecks at compile time. This works in practice - IBM's Java VMs can give application performance equal to (and occasionally even better to than) optimised C code.
> Is Development Faster ? No Yes, on Winodws with visual studio. At least compared to plain C with a texteditor. This also requires use of all the non open stuff of course. Systems like Java and.Net can significantly improve development time as they give you large and well-designed class libraries. Java and.Net also manage memory for you and made debugging a lot easier. (One of the joys of Java is the stack trace with like numbers available on each exception). These advantages are present even with command-line development.
> Does it do things that other languages cannot? No No but that would be an argument against any other language. But having different languages is a good thing. Besides, in theory.NET is language independant, which makes it interesting. [stuff cut]
In principle, any machine code, real or virtual in a VM, is language dependent. The Java VM is not just for Java - there are many languages that can use it, such as JPython, and Smalltalk. The.Net bytecode was marketed as language independent, but in practice it seems to be targetted towards Java-like languages, such as C# and VB.Net.
Nope, not true. We've had rockets powerful enough to take us to Mars for years. We've just not had powerful enough rockets to take us, and all the oxygen we need to breathe while there, and burn to blast off and get back.
We have: Nuclear fission could easily have supplied enough power for a fast return mission to Mars decades ago. There has been considerable (and I think exaggerated) caution about putting substantial amounts of radioactive materials into space with current launch technologies.
Sun make a considerable amount of money from Java. They sell support, they sell IDEs, they sell J2EE licences. They give the low-end stuff (J2SE and Forte community edition) away free to encourage widespread use of the language.
Slashdot Mirror
Should have previewed!
s/develop for Netware/don't develop for Netware/
3) Name 1 ISV anywhere in the world developing application software for Netware/Java, that isn't being paid to do so by Novell.
Duh!
The whole point of Java is that you develop for Netware, or for any other platform. You develop for standard Java or for J2EE and Netware becomes just one of many commercial or open source app servers that run your code.
the real movement is in Open Source and not J2EE.
J2EE is simply a set of specifications. There are many very widely used open source implementations of all or part of J2EE. Apache's Tomcat for example, or JBOSS. Every time you see a JSP page - that's J2EE.
Anyone who things that J2EE is not experiencing real growth has not looked at the IT job market for years.
Star Office/Open Office will soon be making a serious dent in the MS monopoly. There are a large number of organisations and governments who are either evaluation or installing MS alternatives. Star/Open Office seems to be the main Office suite in these suitations.
There is no "standard" MS Office. Do you mean Office 95? Office 97? Office 2000? Office XP? There are many fundamental differences between these versions, both in terms of user interface and functionality, for example MS Access has been a major headache in terms of database and code upgrading between Office versions.
Every few years an organisation is going to have to retrain its staff, whether or not they stick to MS Office. Any school or collage who teaches or trains for a specific Word processor or spreadsheet is wasting time and resources. I have often found that MSOffice training *reduces* the flexibility of users. Untrained and novice users seem to switch easily between different types of word processors, whereas trained users expect buttons in specific places etc.
Forms, mail merges, standard letters are all there under the AutoPilot.
Open the data navigator and you have tables and queries including QBE grids just like in Access. Reports are now present in OO 1.1.
Users with ZERO training and no experience of Access would find equal problems getting things going. I would suggest that users with zero training should not be doing table design, queries or reports. I know from bitter experience that the results of allowing this are frequently an unmanageable mess.
OO *is* ready to replace MS - I have used it for exactly this in commercial organisations.
'only IBM'?
I think thats a strange use of the word 'only'!
Java for Sun may have failed (I don't think it has), but it has not failed for IBM, or Apple, or any of tens of thousands of companies that use it as a development language.
Heh no - but surely if I had, it would be 'caffeinated' rather than 'De-caffeinated'?
Prolog is not a VM language, and is not portable. There are dozens of incompatible dialects.
Remember Turbo Prolog?
Java IS open, and has ALREADY been ported to just about every OS!
.... Kawa, Kaffe, Toba, GCJ ... whatever!
The latest GNU compiler set includes a Java compiler. The spec of the bytecode is available to anyone, and anyone can write a VM to run Java binaries.
There are only two 'closed' parts of Java - you can't officially call your implementation of the VM 'Java' unless it passes Sun's compatibility tests, and you can't officially implement parts of the J2EE spec and call it 'J2EE' without passing Sun's tests and licencing it. But so what? You can call your product anything else you like
What do you think would have happened to Java if Sun hadn't controlled it? It would have fragmented like C/C++ into a hundred dialects with a thousand extensions. Instead you can compile java into bytecode and run that on IBM's VM, HP's VM, Apples VM, Sun's VM. That is why Java is one of the most widely used languages in the history of computing.
"Speaking about Java - just admit that Java has failed."
If being the most widely used programming language, and one of the most demanded skills in the software industry is failure, how would you define success?
See: 'Suns Changing Horizon'
g =s t_rn
http://news.com.com/2009-7339_3-5087245.html?ta
"But even in the face of this barrage, industry veterans say the company is hardly on the verge of collapse."
"Industry veterans say although Sun has warned of a hefty loss and analysts are calling for drastic changes, the company has viable plans for the future."
You can get Mandrake pre-installed on PCs from Hewlett-Packard
Firstly, KDE3 is NOT an overblown file manager. Its a window manager and a software suite. There are thousands of programs written for it, both open source AND commercial.
Secondly, if you want to do design, there are many high-quality programs you can use, especially for CAD. LinuxCAD is superb. For publishing work you can use free packages like Scribus, or go to Adobe for commercial software.
The fact is there are really no alternatives for most people.
This is false. Sit a novice user in front of KDE3 and Open Office on a machine that has been sensibly set up and they will find a familiar interface and will face few cross-training problems. The paradox is that users who are more 'highly trained' tend to find non-MS systems problematic - novices just go ahead and use the system.
The most widely used language in the IT world is dying? Strange definition of the word 'dying'
Why should the growth of Linux destroy Sun? Sun are not a UNIX company - they are a systems provider. They ship software products, they make a considerable amount of money by licensing Enterprise Java. They make some of the best workstation and server products. Solaris - their UNIX - is simply one part of their package. Linux could well replace it in a few years, in low-end and mid-range servers, but this need not hurt Sun.
What IS this anti-Sun thing on Slashdot??
But if it's written by a gay guy, then we could have a camp Doctor, who dresses is really stupid clothes and doesn't seem particularly interested in women . . .
This isn't funny, its stupid and offensive stereotyping. Grow up and get a life.
I realise that this is not going to be a popular view, but in my experience, nothing should ever be just 'thrown together' like this. There will inevitably come a point when the system needs to be extended, adapted or integrated with something else. I have spent much of the past few years re-writing a system that was developed as a set of small quick scripts, but ended up unable to scale to the demands of a growing company.
.Net, as it makes no commercial sense to use a proprietary solution when J2EE does the same thing. As J2EE is inclusive - it runs on the same machines as .Net, there is little reason to use .Net for web services.
An example of using a scalable system might be a website constructed for $0 using Java Server Pages + struts on tomcat. When the company expands, you can deploy the exact same java binaries on a load-balanced set of Oracle application servers or whatever.
PHP fans might want to take a look at the Java Standard`Tag Library - its not as elegant as PHP in many ways, but its full-features and extensible through cross-platform Java code.
Personally, I will not touch
There are phenomenal resources in space. Some carbon-rich asteriods contain organic compounds and lots of ice. A manned mission to one of these would be inexpensive, as the asteroid could supply fuel, oxygen and water, and there would be only a minor gravity well. Its the ideal base for a space station. Mining missions could be launched to mineral-rich asteroids, also with gravity being neglible. One this is started, the system would be self-funding from the mineral resources obtained.
This would only work as a manned mission - you don't want to end up controlling prospecting and mining robots from earth.
.... Blows Swing away...
Then don't use Swing. Use IBM's SWT instead. Its a native GUI library, fully-featured, open source, and available pre-compiled for lots of platforms (OS/X, Windows, Linux etc). Under Windows it allows use of COM/ActiveX etc.
Microsoft's development tools always been good
Sorry, this is nonsense. Having dealt with MS tools for nearly 25 years I have found them to often be some of the worst I have ever used. Visual Studio is a catch-up job, replacing truly awful and buggy command-line tools in the 80s and early 90s. Microsoft were one of the last companies to provide development tools for Windows that actually ran under Windows! I have been used to quality systems like Smalltalk IDEs which include integrated class browsers, run-time re-compilation, object inspectors, class and method finders and documentation. I have also been used to small and efficent IDEs such as those provided by Borland/Inprise. Over the past few years I have been supporting users developing in Visual Basic 6, and the whole thing is a mess, to the extent of some Visual Basic programs actually crashing Visual Studio!
MS tools may look pretty, and be easy for beginners to get started, but for professional OOP development they are definitely low-quality.
Compared to what? Plain C, compiled by a highly optimizing compiler for a certain platform? No, of course not. JAVA? Maybe. Interpreted languages without bytecode support? Maybe.
There is no reason why a high-quality bytecode-based VM system should not match or even beat optimised plain C, if the bytecode interpreter does run-time profiling and translates bytecodes to native instructions. After all, the VM can find the actual bottlenecks during execution as against the predicted bottlenecks at compile time. This works in practice - IBM's Java VMs can give application performance equal to (and occasionally even better to than) optimised C code.
> Is Development Faster ? No
Yes, on Winodws with visual studio. At least compared to plain C with a texteditor. This also requires use of all the non open stuff of course.
Systems like Java and
> Does it do things that other languages cannot? No
No but that would be an argument against any other language. But having different languages is a good thing. Besides, in theory
[stuff cut]
In principle, any machine code, real or virtual in a VM, is language dependent. The Java VM is not just for Java - there are many languages that can use it, such as JPython, and Smalltalk. The
Nope, not true. We've had rockets powerful enough to take us to Mars for years. We've just not had powerful enough rockets to take us, and all the oxygen we need to breathe while there, and burn to blast off and get back.
We have: Nuclear fission could easily have supplied enough power for a fast return mission to Mars decades ago. There has been considerable (and I think exaggerated) caution about putting substantial amounts of radioactive materials into space with current launch technologies.
Sun make a considerable amount of money from Java. They sell support, they sell IDEs, they sell J2EE licences. They give the low-end stuff (J2SE and Forte community edition) away free to encourage widespread use of the language.