LDAP authentication support, Built-in terminal services, Plug-and-play, USB, User switching, Compatibility modes, System restore, An eye-ruining GUI, A dog that helps you find files.
Because its slow, and takes completely the wrong approach. Java is not about running native code apps, its about shipping portable binaries. Its about giving your users and customers the choice of where they run your code without having to compile. Its about shipping a single JAR or WAR file that runs at close to C++ speed on any platform or app server.
Oh your being stupid now. Java has the same engineering requirements really as any compiler toolset.
Fundamentally wrong. Java is NOT a compiler. Its a language + byte code specification + compatibility specification + guaranteed core library set.
Virtual machine technology goes way back and there isn't any mystery anymore too it. There never really was, from a software perspective it was simply a matter of hardware powerful enough to run VM's in the first place!
Nonsense. VM technology has been around for a long time (P-code for example), but only with Java has it been developed so that it is suitable for real high-performance code, and can deal with multi-processing and real-time multithreading. This is very hard, and has required years of intensive research and a lot of funding. There are many languages which have VMs (Such as Smalltalk) than have not achieved this even after decades of development.
gcc and equivalent large edifices of code have been around for a long time and we do not have a billion flavors of gcc.
There have been major incompatibility issues with different versions of GCC, forks of GCC and incompatible versions of Perl. Even highly popular systems like Python have split into 3 forks, and you can't write to a single 'Python' standard.
The OSC community has proven it can work together and utilize standards bodies to insure all software works pretty much the same everywhere.
Windows 2.0? I don't think so. Windows versions prior to 3.1 were useless, except for Reversi. Oh, sure, you could tile half a dozen clocks on your EGA display, but mostly the early versions of Windows were just experimental GUIs riding on top of DOS. Nobody would've compared those Windows versions against a Mac or an Amiga and viewed Microsoft as superior.
I am no fan of Microsoft, but this is just not true. Windows 2.0 turned out to be a major success. It was intended as a prototype for OS/2 development (early OS/2 versions looked a lot light Win 2.0), but took off in its own right. Windows 2.0/386 was far more sophisticated than the Mac system as it had true pre-emptive multi-tasking, and good interaction with DOS memory extenders. Early versions of Windows were real technical achievements: trying to do any soft of DOS multi-tasking on 8086 or 80286 processors was a battle with crap processor design.
I'll give ya RHEL, but just for you rinformation they segregate the non-free stuff to a seperate CD. Amd they include the IBM flavor instead of Sun's.
Any linux flavour could do this. And they don't just include IBM's flavour (or at least, haven't in the past) - last year they announced a distribution arrangement with Sun, not IBM. Things may have changed.
But RedHat and Suse doesn't really count since they are partnered with damned near everyone in the industry.
It is way more cross platform than Sun's implementation: Kaffe has been ported to more than 70 different platforms, includig WinCE, DOS, Playstation2, and mainframes. Sun supports just a handful of i386 platforms and sparc-solaris.
A meaningless statement. Many companies have licenced Sun's code and ported it. A nice thing about Java is that it is multi-vendor. You aren't relying on just one supplier to support Java on all those platforms.
From the Kaffe website:
"Note: Not all of these ports are currently supported, many are no longer actively being worked on by anybody. Much of the work on these ports have not been merged into the main Kaffe tree."
That is why many of us are cautious about GPLing Java - it could end up in that state.
No you can't. You may only distribute the runtime as a part of a larger software package that REQUIRES the JRE.
Not true. You can ship with any value-added software, or with a book or magazine. Even if it were true, all you would have to do is include something small but useful like ant. What is the big deal?
What you can't do is distribute it with a Linux or BSD distribution
Yes you can. RedHat do it. If you get Red Hat Enterprise Linux you get Java right there with it, pre-installed.
Good examples of there either being either no forks, or forks being a minor matter.
The lead developers are still in charge of the base years later, and still doing excellent & creative work,
Absolutely.
so the forking hurt the base exactly how again? And if old code (perl 4 -> 5) requires a rewrite to work, why is that a 'bad thing ?'?
I find this hard to answer, because I feel its self-evident why its bad, but here goes.
The really big deal about Java is portability. If I write for Java 1.2 or above, that code will almost always run fine on Java 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 etc. It won't just compile fine, the binary code itself will work, and I can re-use old compiled libraries from years ago. This code will run on VMs from Sun, IBM, HP apple etc... mostly with not a single line change in apps that are hundreds of thousands of lines in length. For significant software projects, you could be dealing with a code base of over a million lines in length. The real benefit of Java is that you have that single code base for all those platforms, and you can be pretty certain that the code will still be fully functional years from now.
(It is possible to write Java so that it uses only one vendors VM, but the point is you virtually never need to, and its considered bad practise).
This is why Java is not just a language: its also a bytecode definition and a set of guaranteed core libraries and a set of compatibility standards for things such as threading.
If it ever gets to the stage where when you write substantial Java code you have to think 'which supplier's Java' the primary advantage of Java will be gone for good.
Many developers like me have been waiting for Write Once Run Anywhere for a very long time. C++ looked close, Smalltalk very nearly got there but it fell apart, and now we have it (or at least something very close) with Java. Its not something that should be given up lightly.
What do you make of the fact that there are no significant Perl or Python forks?
But there are significant forks, especially for Python: There is CPython, Jython and IronPython, and there are incompatibilities between these.
There were also major differences in Perl versions - lots of things broke in Perl 4 scripts when you move to Perl 5.
These languages are often held up as examples of how Open Source systems don't fork and are portable, but I don't think they are good examples.
Significant, to me, does not mean there are huge differences. The point is that even minor language changes can cause a lot of trouble. Its when you have to take time to develop and test different versions of software for different platforms.
I would like to say to any Sun employees that the very fate of your jobs hang in the balance here...if not the survivability of the company.
I'm sure they are listening to your every word. I'll bet they'll be calling you up any minute with a job offer based on your lucid analysis...
If Java is not opened up gcj will replace it and you will loose relevance.
Oh, gimme a break.
The OSC community will not tolerate the questionable future of Java
Well, blow me. I did not know that you were Lord High Chief of Open Source, and in a position to declare what the 'Community' will or will not tolerate. I must have missed something...
But... I guess you must have the millions of dollars of financing to design, code, test and fine-tune Java VMs for hundreds of different processor architectures. I guess you are prepared to ensure that all java apps run in compatible fashion on all those processors. I guess you have designs for java-specific CPUs ready to be manufactured.
Yeah, thank god gcc can't be used on MS platforms, 'cuz lord knows they'd dominate and ruin the compiler! Oh, wait... I guess the assertion has proved entirely false so far, but keep up the senseless fud.
This is an irrelevant comparison, as its been decades since anyone expected either code or binary compatibility from different C/C++ compilers.
Java is totally about binary deployment and the protection of investment. Java is the ability to code to a known and tested set of libraries and to produce WAR and JAR files that are pretty much guaranteed to run on any certified Java VM.
The entertainment value of intelligent people drawing erroneous and spurious conclusions is pretty high.
I agree.
The only way SUN could loose control of the main code base is if they refused to fold in highly usable and innovative forks developers want to work with.
They nearly did lose control, when Microsoft produced significant windows-specific forks and labelled the result 'Java'. Developers used those libraries and produced Java binaries which could only run on Windows.
Sun is justifiably worried about what other companies with equivalent power to Microsoft could do, such as IBM.
If there had been negative repercusions when Mingw was created, I could see a clear argument. So tell me, where is this GPL'd codebase ruined by MS developers?
MS developers aren't interested in low-volume development systems for Windows - they already have the overwhelming market share. They are interested in the server software market. When something threatens their long-term ambitions in that area, as Java does, they try and wreck it.
Sorry - my reply was incomplete. The first section should have read:
You did try and compare open source software with Sun products you have never tried.
I don't trust anyone's opinion - I make sure I evaluate software before I give my judgement. You find out some very interesting and occasionally hilarious things.....
I appreciate your honesty. But you did try and compare their pro
Sun are a strange company with a very flat structure. You hear all sorts of things coming out from them, but that means nothing in terms of 'ploy', and its certainly not a 'fiasco'. If you have dealings with any large company, you will hear contrary views. I used to have dealings with one of the largest software companies and you would often hear one software product group actively rubbishing another!! At Sun has the decent to have open, public debates.
Can I ask, just out of interest, and not to try and change your mind, why you are not a fan of Java? I used to be a C++ coder, and after a decade struggling with different versions, and incompatible GUI tools, the portability of Java and the garbage collection was exactly what I had always hoped for from C++.
Sun are certainly not 'on the skids'. I remember when Microsoft's stock value plummeted years ago when the antitrust action started. No-one declared that Microsoft was 'on the skids' as they had a huge financial reserve of billions, just like Sun has now.
The thing is, Sun has a huge financial reserve. Even without the MS settlement, they could carry the current loss for years and years. Firstly, the stock market is about fashions, secondly why is an obvious open source fan measuring a companies worth by the stock market?
not of the same caliber as their open source competitors.
Oh come on - that is just not true, and anyone with IT experience should know that. Linux is fabulous, but no-one with serious Operating System experience or Knowledge would say that it is inferior to Solaris. Give it a few years, and I'm certain Linux will catch up, but for now Solaris scales far better, has better kernel-level threading and now has some very powerful features like partitioning.
As for Java - the spec has been out for a long time, but the best the OS community can come out with is GCJ; which is good, but nowhere near the standard of industrial-strength Java VMs.
The reason why forks are not dangerous is because people will still want to write "standard" Java code, no matter how many different strange Java-esque things there are.
That is exactly why forks of something like Java are dangerous.
The thing is, Java is a major part of the software industry today. There are companies who actively want to fork it and produce incompatible non-portable versions that become the de-facto standard: Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
2 logins.
Wow!
On the other hand, the multics operating system was doing better than that in 1965. Way to go Microsoft - only 40 years behind the cutting edge.
The only think NT4 is missing is ...
LDAP authentication support,
Built-in terminal services,
Plug-and-play,
USB,
User switching,
Compatibility modes,
System restore,
An eye-ruining GUI,
A dog that helps you find files.
So you don't see gcj as relevant? Why not?
Because its slow, and takes completely the wrong approach. Java is not about running native code apps, its about shipping portable binaries. Its about giving your users and customers the choice of where they run your code without having to compile. Its about shipping a single JAR or WAR file that runs at close to C++ speed on any platform or app server.
Oh your being stupid now. Java has the same engineering requirements really as any compiler toolset.
Fundamentally wrong. Java is NOT a compiler. Its a language + byte code specification + compatibility specification + guaranteed core library set.
Virtual machine technology goes way back and there isn't any mystery anymore too it. There never really was, from a software perspective it was simply a matter of hardware powerful enough to run VM's in the first place!
Nonsense. VM technology has been around for a long time (P-code for example), but only with Java has it been developed so that it is suitable for real high-performance code, and can deal with multi-processing and real-time multithreading. This is very hard, and has required years of intensive research and a lot of funding. There are many languages which have VMs (Such as Smalltalk) than have not achieved this even after decades of development.
gcc and equivalent large edifices of code have been around for a long time and we do not have a billion flavors of gcc.
There have been major incompatibility issues with different versions of GCC, forks of GCC and incompatible versions of Perl. Even highly popular systems like Python have split into 3 forks, and you can't write to a single 'Python' standard.
The OSC community has proven it can work together and utilize standards bodies to insure all software works pretty much the same everywhere.
Just not true. See above.
Windows 2.0? I don't think so. Windows versions prior to 3.1 were useless, except for Reversi. Oh, sure, you could tile half a dozen clocks on your EGA display, but mostly the early versions of Windows were just experimental GUIs riding on top of DOS. Nobody would've compared those Windows versions against a Mac or an Amiga and viewed Microsoft as superior.
I am no fan of Microsoft, but this is just not true. Windows 2.0 turned out to be a major success. It was intended as a prototype for OS/2 development (early OS/2 versions looked a lot light Win 2.0), but took off in its own right. Windows 2.0/386 was far more sophisticated than the Mac system as it had true pre-emptive multi-tasking, and good interaction with DOS memory extenders. Early versions of Windows were real technical achievements: trying to do any soft of DOS multi-tasking on 8086 or 80286 processors was a battle with crap processor design.
I'll give ya RHEL, but just for you rinformation they segregate the non-free stuff to a seperate CD. Amd they include the IBM flavor instead of Sun's.
:)
Any linux flavour could do this. And they don't just include IBM's flavour (or at least, haven't in the past) - last year they announced a distribution arrangement with Sun, not IBM. Things may have changed.
But RedHat and Suse doesn't really count since they are partnered with damned near everyone in the industry.
So RedHat and Suse 'don't really count' as Linux?
Oh come on, admit you are wrong
It is way more cross platform than Sun's implementation: Kaffe has been ported to more than 70 different platforms, includig WinCE, DOS, Playstation2, and mainframes. Sun supports just a handful of i386 platforms and sparc-solaris.
A meaningless statement. Many companies have licenced Sun's code and ported it. A nice thing about Java is that it is multi-vendor. You aren't relying on just one supplier to support Java on all those platforms.
From the Kaffe website:
"Note: Not all of these ports are currently supported, many are no longer actively being worked on by anybody. Much of the work on these ports have not been merged into the main Kaffe tree."
That is why many of us are cautious about GPLing Java - it could end up in that state.
I see them change their mind constantly. First network computers were in, then out. Solarisx86 is in, then out, then in again.
'Constantly' hardly applies, as these changes took place over a decade.
Linux is in for sparc, then out, then in again with x86 in addition to solaris??
Linux for sparc is nothing to do with Sun, and has been available for years.
No you can't. You may only distribute the runtime as a part of a larger software package that REQUIRES the JRE.
Not true. You can ship with any value-added software, or with a book or magazine. Even if it were true, all you would have to do is include something small but useful like ant. What is the big deal?
What you can't do is distribute it with a Linux or BSD distribution
Yes you can. RedHat do it. If you get Red Hat Enterprise Linux you get Java right there with it, pre-installed.
Will it be free tomorrow?
Yes. There are open source versions.
Sure, but good examples of what?
Good examples of there either being either no forks, or forks being a minor matter.
The lead developers are still in charge of the base years later, and still doing excellent & creative work,
Absolutely.
so the forking hurt the base exactly how again? And if old code (perl 4 -> 5) requires a rewrite to work, why is that a 'bad thing ?'?
I find this hard to answer, because I feel its self-evident why its bad, but here goes.
The really big deal about Java is portability. If I write for Java 1.2 or above, that code will almost always run fine on Java 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 etc. It won't just compile fine, the binary code itself will work, and I can re-use old compiled libraries from years ago. This code will run on VMs from Sun, IBM, HP apple etc... mostly with not a single line change in apps that are hundreds of thousands of lines in length. For significant software projects, you could be dealing with a code base of over a million lines in length. The real benefit of Java is that you have that single code base for all those platforms, and you can be pretty certain that the code will still be fully functional years from now.
(It is possible to write Java so that it uses only one vendors VM, but the point is you virtually never need to, and its considered bad practise).
This is why Java is not just a language: its also a bytecode definition and a set of guaranteed core libraries and a set of compatibility standards for things such as threading.
If it ever gets to the stage where when you write substantial Java code you have to think 'which supplier's Java' the primary advantage of Java will be gone for good.
Many developers like me have been waiting for Write Once Run Anywhere for a very long time. C++ looked close, Smalltalk very nearly got there but it fell apart, and now we have it (or at least something very close) with Java. Its not something that should be given up lightly.
JAVA has two variants; Embedded Java (J2ME) and Enterprise Java (J2EE).
Its three - Micro Edition (J2ME), Standard Edition (J2SE) and J2EE.
What do you make of the fact that there are no significant Perl or Python forks?
But there are significant forks, especially for Python: There is CPython, Jython and IronPython, and there are incompatibilities between these.
There were also major differences in Perl versions - lots of things broke in Perl 4 scripts when you move to Perl 5.
These languages are often held up as examples of how Open Source systems don't fork and are portable, but I don't think they are good examples.
Significant, to me, does not mean there are huge differences. The point is that even minor language changes can cause a lot of trouble. Its when you have to take time to develop and test different versions of software for different platforms.
So.
A company that has been promoting UNIX since the early 1980s sickens you.
A company that has pioneered open standards for decades sickens you.
A company that has freely contributed APIs and protocols such as NFS to development community sickens you.
A company that gives away free compilers and runtimes sickens you.
A company that uses Linux sickens you.
Do I detect a slight bit of exaggeration here?
I would like to say to any Sun employees that the very fate of your jobs hang in the balance here...if not the survivability of the company.
I'm sure they are listening to your every word. I'll bet they'll be calling you up any minute with a job offer based on your lucid analysis...
If Java is not opened up gcj will replace it and you will loose relevance.
Oh, gimme a break.
The OSC community will not tolerate the questionable future of Java
Well, blow me. I did not know that you were Lord High Chief of Open Source, and in a position to declare what the 'Community' will or will not tolerate. I must have missed something...
But... I guess you must have the millions of dollars of financing to design, code, test and fine-tune Java VMs for hundreds of different processor architectures. I guess you are prepared to ensure that all java apps run in compatible fashion on all those processors. I guess you have designs for java-specific CPUs ready to be manufactured.
I am impressed!
And as I recall, this was resolved through trademark litigation. Copyright licensing, proprietary or Free, didd not enter into it.
Irrelevant. The issue of forking still arose.
They think that if they opened say Solaris
1 094,39181540,00.htm
Well, that is exactly what they are about to do:
http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/applications/0,3900
This is not a rumour - it comes right from the top.
Their PR department should squash anything untill it is an official announcement. Just BAD business model IMO.
You could be right, but they have a lot of high-profile people who are probably un-squashable!
(although I am supposed to be learning TK).
Its very neat. Works well with TCL, I found.
But then again I still use win 98 because it does give me a warm fuzzy. Go figure.
heh - I know what you mean.
Yeah, thank god gcc can't be used on MS platforms, 'cuz lord knows they'd dominate and ruin the compiler! Oh, wait... I guess the assertion has proved entirely false so far, but keep up the senseless fud.
This is an irrelevant comparison, as its been decades since anyone expected either code or binary compatibility from different C/C++ compilers.
Java is totally about binary deployment and the protection of investment. Java is the ability to code to a known and tested set of libraries and to produce WAR and JAR files that are pretty much guaranteed to run on any certified Java VM.
The entertainment value of intelligent people drawing erroneous and spurious conclusions is pretty high.
I agree.
The only way SUN could loose control of the main code base is if they refused to fold in highly usable and innovative forks developers want to work with.
They nearly did lose control, when Microsoft produced significant windows-specific forks and labelled the result 'Java'. Developers used those libraries and produced Java binaries which could only run on Windows.
Sun is justifiably worried about what other companies with equivalent power to Microsoft could do, such as IBM.
If there had been negative repercusions when Mingw was created, I could see a clear argument. So tell me, where is this GPL'd codebase ruined by MS developers?
MS developers aren't interested in low-volume development systems for Windows - they already have the overwhelming market share. They are interested in the server software market. When something threatens their long-term ambitions in that area, as Java does, they try and wreck it.
Sorry - my reply was incomplete. The first section should have read:
You did try and compare open source software with Sun products you have never tried.
I don't trust anyone's opinion - I make sure I evaluate software before I give my judgement. You find out some very interesting and occasionally hilarious things.....
I appreciate your honesty. But you did try and compare their pro
Sun are a strange company with a very flat structure. You hear all sorts of things coming out from them, but that means nothing in terms of 'ploy', and its certainly not a 'fiasco'. If you have dealings with any large company, you will hear contrary views. I used to have dealings with one of the largest software companies and you would often hear one software product group actively rubbishing another!!
At Sun has the decent to have open, public debates.
Can I ask, just out of interest, and not to try and change your mind, why you are not a fan of Java? I used to be a C++ coder, and after a decade struggling with different versions, and incompatible GUI tools, the portability of Java and the garbage collection was exactly what I had always hoped for from C++.
Sun are certainly not 'on the skids'. I remember when Microsoft's stock value plummeted years ago when the antitrust action started. No-one declared that Microsoft was 'on the skids' as they had a huge financial reserve of billions, just like Sun has now.
Its not flamebait! You make good points.
The thing is, Sun has a huge financial reserve. Even without the MS settlement, they could carry the current loss for years and years. Firstly, the stock market is about fashions, secondly why is an obvious open source fan measuring a companies worth by the stock market?
not of the same caliber as their open source competitors.
Oh come on - that is just not true, and anyone with IT experience should know that. Linux is fabulous, but no-one with serious Operating System experience or Knowledge would say that it is inferior to Solaris. Give it a few years, and I'm certain Linux will catch up, but for now Solaris scales far better, has better kernel-level threading and now has some very powerful features like partitioning.
As for Java - the spec has been out for a long time, but the best the OS community can come out with is GCJ; which is good, but nowhere near the standard of industrial-strength Java VMs.
The reason why forks are not dangerous is because people will still want to write "standard" Java code, no matter how many different strange Java-esque things there are.
That is exactly why forks of something like Java are dangerous.
The thing is, Java is a major part of the software industry today. There are companies who actively want to fork it and produce incompatible non-portable versions that become the de-facto standard: Microsoft.
Losing Money? Like the huge amount they just got paid as a legal settlement from Microsoft; enough to keep them in business for a very long time?
Losing business? Like the new and increasing demand for Java Desktop? Like their rapidly expanding software services division?
*sigh* more Slashdot wishful thinking and FUD.
Total nonsense. Sun is having a debate. If they were not having a debate, Slashdot would ridicule them for their fixed attitude and rigid management.
They are not running into Microsoft. They won a battle with Microsoft, and won big. Microsoft gave in and paid them a lot of money.
Java is free. You can download it for nothing. You can distribute the runtime for nothing.
Free != Open Source