Developers that are purely targeting windows probably have no great interest in looking at Java on the client side as they can specifically code for Windows itself.
Absolutely. The poster seems to be confusing developers who are writing code that is intended to be deployed on Windows and developers who are writing code specifically targetted at Windows only.
No, it means that most VB developers have migrated to C#. It's still way closer to VB6 than Java, both in terms of API, and toolset provided (Visual Studio.NET and MSDN).
Most VB developers have not.
From News.com: "Surveys by Evans Data indicate that the number of VB6 developers outnumber the people who have learned VB.Net.". The statistics show that there is little VB6 to C# migration. Most of the migration is to VB.Net, and most still have not migrated. Of those who have migrated away from VB6, many have moved to non-MS languages, including Java, according to many surveys.
Nonsense. I've been developing Windows software professionally since around 1995, and I can tell you with all certainty that almost no Windows developers use Java, unless it is for an existing codebase.
Nonsense. I have been developing Windows software professionally since around 1987! I can tell you with certainty that there are many new projects using Java for deployment on Windows. A simple job search shows this. There may not be a large amount of client side development, but that is because most new projects in all areas of development are web-based.
Sure, there are some Java jobs now, and this is primarily because companies heavily invested in Java during the 1990s.
That can't explain new J2EE developments and does not explain the significant migration of VB6 developers to Java:
http://news.com.com/Developers+slam+Microsoft%27s+ Visual+Basic+plan/2100-1007_3-5615331.html?tag=st. rn
But virtually no one is using Java on Windows for client stuff anymore, especially with the VM incompatibilities that exist on this side of the fence.
The only incompatibilities are between MS's VM and others. Most new PCs (around 70%) are shipped with Sun's VM, and the JRE download for the rest is no worse than the.NET runtime.
Go to Windows dev-centric sites like The Code Project, see how many Java articles, content, source code, or jobs you can find, you'll see what I mean.
Well you wouldn't find many there - it is a site dedicated to Microsoft development languages!
I think that by them doing this and spreading Java is better than Microsoft doing similar tactics to spread.NET.
I think using Java is a positive step. There are Java JDBC interfaces for almost all databases, and almost all large corporations are likely to have Java development skills.
Consider all those foolish companies who built infrastructure on VB6 now that Microsoft is cutting off support for that platform
Had they picked an open source platform it would be much less disruptive for their business.
The point you have raised - the ability of a company to drop support for a development language - has nothing to do with whether or not that language or platform is open source. Most organisations that use a development language aren't interested in being dumped with megabytes of source code if a language provider either stops development or goes out of business - open source doesn't help.
Java is so successful and popular for commercial development because it is multi-vendor. If you don't want to use Sun's VM and JDK you can use IBM's, or HP's, or BEA's, or TowerJ's, or even GJC. Not all are available on all OSes, but you have a choice, and you are not going to be left abandoned, like VB6 users.
I could be wrong, but I believe that MS's Java support (while it existed) only extended as far as v1.1.3, not v1.3. Of course, that's because they lost the court case to Sun, not because they couldn't or wouldn't support a newer version.
They wouldn't even support standard features in 1.1.3, such as RMI. This is why they lost the court case.
Corporate adoption may be slowed, as OO.o isn't a completely "free, fully functional" product anymore.
Yes it is. It costs nothing and it is fully functional. The truth is that use of Java is more likely to speed corporate adoption, as Java is the de-facto language for corporate server-side development. It has a good corporate reputation.
Few companies who install Open Office care about the technicalities of FOSS. They like Open Office in the same way as they like Java - it allows a choice of workstation OS, and it gives portability.
For FOSS advocates, the issue of Java integration into Open Office may be significant, but the fact is that most people don't care.
For us Windows devs, no one uses Java anymore; if you do, it's for support of an existing product. Virtually all new projects are.NET-based or native code.
This may well be true for you, but it is not true in general. A quick search of Job sites shows that there is a considerable amount of new Java development on Windows, even client-side. There is also a lot of J2EE deployment on Windows servers.
The lack of a straightforward migration path from VB6 to.NET has meant that a significant number of VB developers have migrated to Java. If you are migrating, it might as well be to something portable!
If I had a child, I would, once it were born, be fully responsible for its life; I would choose whether it learned French while young, or the piano, or karate, the flute...
You aren't fully responsible. The state ensures that your child is educated and if you mess up, the state has to take over.
If it's entirely up to me what my child is given to learn while it's young, why would it be wrong then also to choose the gender of my child? especially if I were having a larger family and might, for example, want a balanced number of boys and girls?
Because 'gender' is a complex matter, and if you start to choose based on it alone you are probably making assumptions about how the child will grow up and behave. Suppose you chose a girl and the child turned out to be a tomboy? Suppose she turned out to be a lesbian? Suppose there was some way for screening for 'femininity' - would you want to choose a child based on both sex chromosomes AND this gene, so that you ended up with a 'real' girl? where does this end?
I would seriously question what you or anyone else who wanted to choose a girl child were really after. If you want to 'balance' a family, as some say, what exactly do you think you are balancing? The nature of a person is based on so much more than just their sex, and it is naive and simplistic to define someone just on that basis.
Why would life on mars necessarily be DNA-based, and why would protiens and lipids nessarily evolve if life evolves? Certainly, other methods of reproduction may have evolved.
Because life has almost certainly been regularly transferred throughout the solar system as a result of meteors. A meteor strike can splash material away from the site of impact at speeds greater than the escape velocity of Earth or Mars or any other inner-solar-system planet. This is why we find 'Martian meteorites' on Earth. It has been demonstrated that bacterial can survive the force of such impacts and remain viable. Bacterial spores could certainly survive for a considerable time in space. I would be amazed if at least bacterial life was not found on Mars, and I would expect it to be directly related to Earth bacteria.
Incidentally, this is why we need not worry about bringing back dangerous microbes from Mars during future sample return missions - contaminated samples of rock are being exchanged between Earth and Mars (and other solar system bodies) all the time.
Since when was Competitor B, which holds 6% of the market, considered a "serious player" capable of holding sway over Competitor A, which holds 89% of the market.
Because if you develop public websites, 6% of visitors to your website is a usually large number of people. That number of complaints because your website is only compatible with IE is a real problem.
Yes, I was considering Firefox only, and was wrong.
If IE usage continues to decline, eventually IE-only development policies are going to become untenable for most web sites. I would guess that if IE usage drops as far as 80%, most developers of non-intranet web sites are going to have to test on multiple browsers and focus on standards compliance.
My point was that this already is the situation. For a company with thousands of users, even 1% of incompatible browsers is a problem.
It's 6 freaking perecent. It's not much. It's nothing to get excited about, nor is it news.
For developers who produce public websites it is very important. It used to be the policy of some organisations to only develop for IE viewing. That policy no longer makes sense. It would mean that more than 1 in 20 of your customers would have difficulties with your website. For a business with thousands of users (or more), like a bank, that is a real problem.
XML is just a representation of hierarchy data via named parameters and list.
It is far more than that.
It conforms to a standard. It allows its format to be extended in standard ways without breaking the original meaning. It has rules for allowing internationalisation. Also, there are a large number of efficient parsers and processors already written for it in almost every language.
Also with code structures you can add dynamic functionality like
'rsv_time' = localtime(time)
The XML dialect known as XSLT allows for such dynamic functionality, and in a standard way.
So Let Me ask you this. If Ms releases its network protocols to the public, do you think that will cause even more exploits to be discovered and put the average use at more of a risk to being hacked.
Of course not. Network traffic that is hackable should be put behind firewalls. Opening the protocols simply allows other operating systems and products to use the same protocols as Windows does.
All of the network protocols that Unix/Linux uses are open to the public!
It is entirely against the long-term interests of the entire industry for governments to say 'you must write software in ways we approve or we'll seize your revenue and/or exclude you from the marketplace'.
They can write the software any way they like.
They just can't restrict access to their platform or APIs because they happen to be in a monopoly situation. As windows is so widespread other companies should have the ability to make use of the platform and integrate with in the same way as Microsoft does.
Once they start running, they're usually OK. Although I find that most GUI applications are really flakey under Linux and Solaris, which is strange.
I simply haven't found this. I use NetBeans under Linux for hours each day, and have had no problems at all.
My point was that it's a complete pain to set up Java under Linux and Solaris. Once they're installed and you get everything set up ($PATH, $JAVA_HOME, etc.) then it's fairly painless.
I think saying it is a 'complete pain' is exaggerating somewhat! You either do a simple rpm install, or just unpack an archive, and that is it! Add the java/bin directory to your path and you are away - that is only two actions.
Some programs do need JAVA_HOME, but again, that is only one command.
One area where big improvements can be made is Matrix transforms, most CPU's come with SIMD for floating point (or integer) operations, they are often several times faster than using SISD instructions, I don't know if any JVM's suport SIMD yet, and I know that GCC 4.0 will be the first GCC to add reasonable support for SIMD.
According to IBM:
"the latest x86 VMs from Sun and IBM will automatically exploit Intel's SIMD instructions (MMX/SSE/SSE2) on machines that support these (Pentium-IV and better will support all). This single factor doubles the score of FP-intensive benchmarks like JGF. Using the same VMs and bytecode, in lesser CPUs, the JIT will use the slower x87 instructions."
That was from 2003... so I'm assuming it does...
I guess benchmarking Java against GCC 4.0 would be interesting (using the -server hotspot setting, which is more optimising).
One is whole bytes the other is pointers and bytes, I can do *(bar+10) = 123; I can't do *(foo+10) = 123;
Java may be good at pixelmaps, but the method you suggested for multi-dimensional arrays isn't
Firstly, it wasn't me - I think you are referring to another poster regarding arrays.
But, after all, isn't image/pixmap handling, transforms and various 2d/3d processes what most games are all about these days?
The Java approach is not to write all this yourself, but to use existing libraries.
I could be wrong, but I'm suggesting that the kind of low-level manipulation you are describing is mostly unnecessary - others have written (fast) code to do this for you...
this is no good for raw data maps, like BMP, or pixelmaps or anything you could mmap in C, for that you have to use a ray block of char's and index into it.
This is not the case. Java has a large number of high-performance methods to handle raw data maps as part of the standard API. Take a look at java.awt.DataBuffer and subclasses.
"Funny, freedom is the reason I switched from C/C++ to Java."
Huh, you switched from an open standard with many F/OSS implementations and libraries to a closed source product based on a closed standard - for "freedom"?
Java is neither a closed source product or a closed standard.
Java isn't closed source, any more than C or C++ is closed source, because Java is not a product - it's a language. Anyone can write an implementation of the Java VM and the Java language. Just because Sun's particular implementation isn't open source doesn't mean that others can't be - look at Kaffe and Sablevm.
Java isn't a closed standard. Java evolves via a combination of the JCP (which anyone can join for free) and open-source tools and libraries.
Java is "write once, run on Windows well and everywhere else poorly", which is really too bad.
Absolutely true. About 8 years ago. Then Java on Linux was slow and buggy. Now I transfer major projects back and forth between Linux and Windows with no effort and no 'running poorly' problems. Everything works the same - file handling, threading, networking, GUI apps.
Especially now that Java is in direct competition with.NET, further sabotage actions are not unlikely.
This is something of a myth, I believe..NET is being used either for web scripting (ASP.NET) in competition with PHP, or as an upgrade to Visual Basic projects client side. There is little impact at all on Java's main area of use: medium-to-large server side applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Developers that are purely targeting windows probably have no great interest in looking at Java on the client side as they can specifically code for Windows itself.
Absolutely. The poster seems to be confusing developers who are writing code that is intended to be deployed on Windows and developers who are writing code specifically targetted at Windows only.
No, it means that most VB developers have migrated to C#. It's still way closer to VB6 than Java, both in terms of API, and toolset provided (Visual Studio .NET and MSDN).
Most VB developers have not.
From News.com: "Surveys by Evans Data indicate that the number of VB6 developers outnumber the people who have learned VB.Net.". The statistics show that there is little VB6 to C# migration. Most of the migration is to VB.Net, and most still have not migrated. Of those who have migrated away from VB6, many have moved to non-MS languages, including Java, according to many surveys.
Nonsense. I've been developing Windows software professionally since around 1995, and I can tell you with all certainty that almost no Windows developers use Java, unless it is for an existing codebase.
+ Visual+Basic+plan/2100-1007_3-5615331.html?tag=st. rn
.NET runtime.
Nonsense. I have been developing Windows software professionally since around 1987! I can tell you with certainty that there are many new projects using Java for deployment on Windows. A simple job search shows this. There may not be a large amount of client side development, but that is because most new projects in all areas of development are web-based.
Sure, there are some Java jobs now, and this is primarily because companies heavily invested in Java during the 1990s.
That can't explain new J2EE developments and does not explain the significant migration of VB6 developers to Java:
http://news.com.com/Developers+slam+Microsoft%27s
But virtually no one is using Java on Windows for client stuff anymore, especially with the VM incompatibilities that exist on this side of the fence.
The only incompatibilities are between MS's VM and others. Most new PCs (around 70%) are shipped with Sun's VM, and the JRE download for the rest is no worse than the
Go to Windows dev-centric sites like The Code Project, see how many Java articles, content, source code, or jobs you can find, you'll see what I mean.
Well you wouldn't find many there - it is a site dedicated to Microsoft development languages!
I think that by them doing this and spreading Java is better than Microsoft doing similar tactics to spread .NET.
I think using Java is a positive step. There are Java JDBC interfaces for almost all databases, and almost all large corporations are likely to have Java development skills.
Consider all those foolish companies who built infrastructure on VB6 now that Microsoft is cutting off support for that platform
Had they picked an open source platform it would be much less disruptive for their business.
The point you have raised - the ability of a company to drop support for a development language - has nothing to do with whether or not that language or platform is open source. Most organisations that use a development language aren't interested in being dumped with megabytes of source code if a language provider either stops development or goes out of business - open source doesn't help.
Java is so successful and popular for commercial development because it is multi-vendor. If you don't want to use Sun's VM and JDK you can use IBM's, or HP's, or BEA's, or TowerJ's, or even GJC. Not all are available on all OSes, but you have a choice, and you are not going to be left abandoned, like VB6 users.
I could be wrong, but I believe that MS's Java support (while it existed) only extended as far as v1.1.3, not v1.3. Of course, that's because they lost the court case to Sun, not because they couldn't or wouldn't support a newer version.
They wouldn't even support standard features in 1.1.3, such as RMI. This is why they lost the court case.
The additional functionality or ease of development or use provided by Java bears a cost, which may or may not be acceptable to the end users.
This is true of any development language, FOSS or not.
Corporate adoption may be slowed, as OO.o isn't a completely "free, fully functional" product anymore.
Yes it is. It costs nothing and it is fully functional. The truth is that use of Java is more likely to speed corporate adoption, as Java is the de-facto language for corporate server-side development. It has a good corporate reputation.
Few companies who install Open Office care about the technicalities of FOSS. They like Open Office in the same way as they like Java - it allows a choice of workstation OS, and it gives portability.
For FOSS advocates, the issue of Java integration into Open Office may be significant, but the fact is that most people don't care.
For us Windows devs, no one uses Java anymore; if you do, it's for support of an existing product. Virtually all new projects are .NET-based or native code.
.NET has meant that a significant number of VB developers have migrated to Java. If you are migrating, it might as well be to something portable!
This may well be true for you, but it is not true in general. A quick search of Job sites shows that there is a considerable amount of new Java development on Windows, even client-side. There is also a lot of J2EE deployment on Windows servers.
The lack of a straightforward migration path from VB6 to
If I had a child, I would, once it were born, be fully responsible for its life; I would choose whether it learned French while young, or the piano, or karate, the flute...
You aren't fully responsible. The state ensures that your child is educated and if you mess up, the state has to take over.
If it's entirely up to me what my child is given to learn while it's young, why would it be wrong then also to choose the gender of my child? especially if I were having a larger family and might, for example, want a balanced number of boys and girls?
Because 'gender' is a complex matter, and if you start to choose based on it alone you are probably making assumptions about how the child will grow up and behave. Suppose you chose a girl and the child turned out to be a tomboy? Suppose she turned out to be a lesbian? Suppose there was some way for screening for 'femininity' - would you want to choose a child based on both sex chromosomes AND this gene, so that you ended up with a 'real' girl? where does this end?
I would seriously question what you or anyone else who wanted to choose a girl child were really after. If you want to 'balance' a family, as some say, what exactly do you think you are balancing? The nature of a person is based on so much more than just their sex, and it is naive and simplistic to define someone just on that basis.
Why would life on mars necessarily be DNA-based, and why would protiens and lipids nessarily evolve if life evolves? Certainly, other methods of reproduction may have evolved.
Because life has almost certainly been regularly transferred throughout the solar system as a result of meteors. A meteor strike can splash material away from the site of impact at speeds greater than the escape velocity of Earth or Mars or any other inner-solar-system planet. This is why we find 'Martian meteorites' on Earth. It has been demonstrated that bacterial can survive the force of such impacts and remain viable. Bacterial spores could certainly survive for a considerable time in space. I would be amazed if at least bacterial life was not found on Mars, and I would expect it to be directly related to Earth bacteria.
Incidentally, this is why we need not worry about bringing back dangerous microbes from Mars during future sample return missions - contaminated samples of rock are being exchanged between Earth and Mars (and other solar system bodies) all the time.
Since when was Competitor B, which holds 6% of the market, considered a "serious player" capable of holding sway over Competitor A, which holds 89% of the market.
Because if you develop public websites, 6% of visitors to your website is a usually large number of people. That number of complaints because your website is only compatible with IE is a real problem.
1 in 10, not 1 in 20.
Yes, I was considering Firefox only, and was wrong.
If IE usage continues to decline, eventually IE-only development policies are going to become untenable for most web sites. I would guess that if IE usage drops as far as 80%, most developers of non-intranet web sites are going to have to test on multiple browsers and focus on standards compliance.
My point was that this already is the situation. For a company with thousands of users, even 1% of incompatible browsers is a problem.
It's 6 freaking perecent. It's not much. It's nothing to get excited about, nor is it news.
For developers who produce public websites it is very important. It used to be the policy of some organisations to only develop for IE viewing. That policy no longer makes sense. It would mean that more than 1 in 20 of your customers would have difficulties with your website. For a business with thousands of users (or more), like a bank, that is a real problem.
XML is just a representation of hierarchy data via named parameters and list.
It is far more than that.
It conforms to a standard. It allows its format to be extended in standard ways without breaking the original meaning. It has rules for allowing internationalisation. Also, there are a large number of efficient parsers and processors already written for it in almost every language.
Also with code structures you can add dynamic functionality like
'rsv_time' = localtime(time)
The XML dialect known as XSLT allows for such dynamic functionality, and in a standard way.
which you can't with XML...
So Let Me ask you this. If Ms releases its network protocols to the public, do you think that will cause even more exploits to be discovered and put the average use at more of a risk to being hacked.
Of course not. Network traffic that is hackable should be put behind firewalls. Opening the protocols simply allows other operating systems and products to use the same protocols as Windows does.
All of the network protocols that Unix/Linux uses are open to the public!
It is entirely against the long-term interests of the entire industry for governments to say 'you must write software in ways we approve or we'll seize your revenue and/or exclude you from the marketplace'.
They can write the software any way they like.
They just can't restrict access to their platform or APIs because they happen to be in a monopoly situation. As windows is so widespread other companies should have the ability to make use of the platform and integrate with in the same way as Microsoft does.
Once they start running, they're usually OK. Although I find that most GUI applications are really flakey under Linux and Solaris, which is strange.
I simply haven't found this. I use NetBeans under Linux for hours each day, and have had no problems at all.
My point was that it's a complete pain to set up Java under Linux and Solaris. Once they're installed and you get everything set up ($PATH, $JAVA_HOME, etc.) then it's fairly painless.
I think saying it is a 'complete pain' is exaggerating somewhat! You either do a simple rpm install, or just unpack an archive, and that is it! Add the java/bin directory to your path and you are away - that is only two actions.
Some programs do need JAVA_HOME, but again, that is only one command.
One area where big improvements can be made is Matrix transforms, most CPU's come with SIMD for floating point (or integer) operations, they are often several times faster than using SISD instructions, I don't know if any JVM's suport SIMD yet, and I know that GCC 4.0 will be the first GCC to add reasonable support for SIMD.
According to IBM:
"the latest x86 VMs from Sun and IBM will automatically exploit Intel's SIMD instructions (MMX/SSE/SSE2) on machines that support these (Pentium-IV and better will support all). This single factor doubles the score of FP-intensive benchmarks like JGF. Using the same VMs and bytecode, in lesser CPUs, the JIT will use the slower x87 instructions."
That was from 2003... so I'm assuming it does...
I guess benchmarking Java against GCC 4.0 would be interesting (using the -server hotspot setting, which is more optimising).
char foo*[3] {a , b, c};
is not the same as
char bar[3][3] {1,2,3,1,2,3, 1,2,3};
One is whole bytes the other is pointers and bytes, I can do *(bar+10) = 123; I can't do *(foo+10) = 123;
Java may be good at pixelmaps, but the method you suggested for multi-dimensional arrays isn't
Firstly, it wasn't me - I think you are referring to another poster regarding arrays.
But, after all, isn't image/pixmap handling, transforms and various 2d/3d processes what most games are all about these days?
The Java approach is not to write all this yourself, but to use existing libraries.
I could be wrong, but I'm suggesting that the kind of low-level manipulation you are describing is mostly unnecessary - others have written (fast) code to do this for you...
this is no good for raw data maps, like BMP, or pixelmaps or anything you could mmap in C, for that you have to use a ray block of char's and index into it.
This is not the case. Java has a large number of high-performance methods to handle raw data maps as part of the standard API. Take a look at java.awt.DataBuffer and subclasses.
"Funny, freedom is the reason I switched from C/C++ to Java."
Huh, you switched from an open standard with many F/OSS implementations and libraries to a closed source product based on a closed standard - for "freedom"?
Java is neither a closed source product or a closed standard.
Java isn't closed source, any more than C or C++ is closed source, because Java is not a product - it's a language. Anyone can write an implementation of the Java VM and the Java language. Just because Sun's particular implementation isn't open source doesn't mean that others can't be - look at Kaffe and Sablevm.
Java isn't a closed standard. Java evolves via a combination of the JCP (which anyone can join for free) and open-source tools and libraries.
Java is "write once, run on Windows well and everywhere else poorly", which is really too bad.
Absolutely true. About 8 years ago. Then Java on Linux was slow and buggy. Now I transfer major projects back and forth between Linux and Windows with no effort and no 'running poorly' problems. Everything works the same - file handling, threading, networking, GUI apps.
Especially now that Java is in direct competition with .NET, further sabotage actions are not unlikely.
.NET is being used either for web scripting (ASP.NET) in competition with PHP, or as an upgrade to Visual Basic projects client side. There is little impact at all on Java's main area of use: medium-to-large server side applications.
This is something of a myth, I believe.
One possible out here is to use the inputs to the system to reduce the chaotic dynamics and hence make the system somewhat more predictable.
:)
OK, I understand
I just think that fine weather control is somewhat in the realm of fantasy...