30 shitty applications. That's the sample you've built this thesis on? That's it?
I will keep repeating ad nauseum that those are the only applications that count to me and many businesses that use them. That is a 100% of a sample of a Java apps that are shitty. Either all of those were written by poeple have no clue what they are doing (unlike all of those wonderful mythical apps always deployed somewhere else and written by enlightened geniuses) or the Java snake oil is just that.
and I am starting to wonder how much experience you have in general, because what I'm conspicuously not hearing is X and Y and Z systems are way better for A and B and C. Just vague generalities about HTML forms and (I think?) coding in C? Or do you perhaps favor VBScript?
Since you are getting more incredibly fanatical and blind by the minute, let me spell it out for you as clear as I can:
For e-commerce, OS/browser agnostic plain HTML on the browser is the only sane way to do anything because it does not rely on any client capablities other then ability to render HTML. No deployment issues, no maintanance costs. Java (and ActiveX and C# and similarly retarded ideas) is a way to create deployment issues and thus support costs and thus employment for countless Java tweaker monkeys. Something dear to your heart no doubt.
For applications that must run on thick-clients (I sure hope due to CPU usage because any other reason in a corporation is plain retarded) one can use native code just fine because: vast majority if C or C++ or any other language programs need only to support very few platforms in their entire life span and the effort to optimize that program for these platforms is well paid for by removal of integration and thus support issues. But such need is extremely rare because vast majority never leave a single platform. A Windows Java app will never run as well as a native Windows app neither will unix Java app run as well as a native unix app. This is not even up for discussion. The most convoluted of JITs and what nots are still overhead over native code and I will not even entertain any moronic discussion on that topic no more that I will entertain discussions of how you can make 2 and 2 equal 7.
I regret to inform you that you are full of shit.
I regret to inform you that you are just a priest of yet another silly language who has no clue who pays his bills. VB apps are everywhere in business, far more so then Java ones. These numbers are representing current jobs, corresponding to a peak in a cycle of a fad, VB waning hard (previous fad), Java peaking (current fad) and C# just coming up. I am fully expecting to have this very same retarded conversation with a C# priest, in, oh about 4 years time.
You sound confused. Are you saying it's easier or cheaper to write native applications? That natives are more secure?
Are you happy with all your current native applications?
No it is you who is utterly confused, something about a theory whereby the Earth is flat and supported by Java beans. To spell it out for you again (I will resist an urge to use large letters): Native apps are easier to write (many decades of experience and tools), run better (many decades of OS design and integration of apps with the OS), cheaper to write and support because they use proven framework and tools, they integrate well with the user environment, have better performance (even the not so well written ones) and the so called "write once, deploy everywhere" is not only unnecessary but is more accurately described as "write once, debug and crash everywhere". Are they more secure? Depends what kind. The "no client side, java-less, HTML only e-commerce"? Most certainly. The locally deployed, locally networking native apps? They are not any more vulnerable then the OS itself. Are we clear now, Your Beanness?
nobody sees the world ending but you, all those students and professors, all those magazines and newswpapers and Fortune 500 compan
In other words, it's possible to write shitty code in either Java or another Object Oriented language
Quite true although it is not humanly possible to have more hype, hot air and hubris in any other language other then Java, C# being second close contender. Why if one were to listen to what we are being told, one cant possibly write bad code in Java for the language is divine and one's hand is guided with certainty by the fairies of object-oriented-pointerless-bliss.
Thus, using Java for a few boxes of interactive input is also unacceptable...people start using it for everything, including things its not suited for....not suited for this task... not meant to do this... not really meant to do that...
Go explain it to all those salesmen from Sun who were running around in the.com bubble times claiming that this is the type of application Java was meant for
Still hammering on the straw man. How many apps does "all" stand for, by the way? In total? Less than a dozen? Less than 6?
At any particular time in a given company there typically around 4-5 critically important for business and totally frustrating ones in simultenaous use although accross various companies I deal with there is probably over 30 and more if you add the abandoned and aborted ones we manged to talk people out of (sometimes under a threat of moving the bank account somewhere else for example). Note that these are all real-life business apps and not games, "test" or "reference" ones. In real life this is the only thing that counts.
Go on, genocide Java, and force everyone to write applications in C or PHP or something, with HTML forms.
Risking being repetetive: HTML with server side is the only sane and truly OS/browser agnostic way of writing e-commerce applications which is what we see Java used in business for and which is what Java was hyped for by Sun.
So, how many simulatneous VM instances do you typically run at once, comrade?
On a win2k thin-client system (used by people who care about things like TCO and not latest fads in languages), each user has one or more.
notice you crumpled immediately on your implied claim that it was impossible deal with the latency issue in the client.
No I merely mocked you because your Quake 3D Java clone is a laughable excercise in futility running slower then original, consuming vast amounts of memory compared to original and not in the slightest more portable then original. Wake me up when all the major game makers start shipping all of their games exclusively in Java and do not get lynched by their customers.
Java justifiably huge, important, and ubiquitous,
Nowhere near the size of VB for example (not that I am advocating VB). What is huge, ubiquitous and justifiably so are native applications which luckily outnumber Java ones 10000:1. Also Java is absolutely most important when it comes to hype although given time I am sure MS will take that crown with its own nonsense of C#. In the meantime the world will keep on turning and there will be us the users with the same "old and boring" native apps loong after the fizzle went out of this latest hype dot-bomb known as Java.
You clearly do not follow what I was saying. I was being funny when I mentioned "flipping a bit". What I was really referring to is the object-oriented-everything-paradigm libraries that make Java such a dog for all practical purposes. Speaking of your example, I am sure that in most OO-zealot written apps this is more like (in my funky pseudo-code):
That's funny because the company I work for uses an applet through which nearly 1/2 billion dollars of its yealy revenue flows. It is well written, works like champ
Good for you. I hope that your users share that opinion instead of just the developers. If your organization is anything like the ones I work with, you might be suprised what management/developers believe "works as a champ" versus what the word (usually a 4-letter one) on the subject in the trenches is...
Yes I am. Meaning I am the person who pays the bills that make your dicking around with Java possible
Probably on a windows box
Mostly on win2k servers in thin-client corporate environments
Probably crawling with viruses, worms, trojans, and all the other devils inflicted regularly
Err... no. There is no trojans, virii and any other sort of malware on these servers, primarilly because I prevent users from installing things like... Java JRE's de-jeur and ActiveX infectware.
on noobs like you.
I am afraid you werent born when I was a "noob" in computing. As a matter of fact the word "noob" wasnt coined yet.
What a moron. Go back to your living room, your television is lonely.
And this my friend precisely sums up the wisdom and maturity of most vocal of Java advocates. It also quite clearly highlights which one of us is serous and which one hacks "1337 uBeR jaVa ApPz" on mom's PC.
First a disclaimer, I wrote the original post you seem to quote. I do not write Java apps and although I was mostly facetous, here is why I said those things:
there are a thousand "super-efficient".jar libraries required by a "Hello World" app
No.
Well it certainly feels that way when you try to load those apps. They all have excruciating startup times. Perheaps I am wrong and instead they check the integrity of my bank account or weather in China for my convenience. I dont really care, but 5-6 seconds of startup for a few boxes of interactive input is not really acceptable.
it takes 12 objects instantiated in 4 containers to flip a bit in a byte
Oh, I see. You're flipping bytes.
I do not write Jave apps but I am quite familiar with OOP and also with the great zeal Java disciples apply it to everything. Like every other paradigm, one-size-fits-all applied to extremes allways results in the effects I described. My comment was to illustrate that if you go nuts and have hundreds of objetcs, events and containers all over the place, you are bound to end up with huge overhead. This is not restricted to Java by any means and many a C++ library suffers from the same issues. Java from what my (cursory I admit) glance at the language/libraries takes this to just such extremes.
there is the substitution of native performance of compiled code to code compiled "Just Too Late" combined with exceptional memory usage that entails
The "Just Too Late" was just a pun on the hype JIT is endowed with. The memory requirement (if you had read the thread where the original post was made) was confirmed by just about anybody including those who advocate Java. As I explained in there, if you have a 10-15 meg per JRE + 10-50 (memory managment seems to suck badly for the apps we use) per instance of an application (no way an OS can share DLLs or.so's here) in a multi-user environment, and this caused by 4 lines of input, ridiculous e-commerce apps, one has problems. Remember, I am not a Java theorist. Merely a user of apps written in your favourite cure-all language.
multiple, insideously incompatible with each other, versions of the so-called "universal" VM
Yes, leaving aside the fact that Microsoft deliberately broke VM compatibility. Not just in one or two big ways. In a lot of little ways. As in on purpose. Great example. Very honest
I dont care who broke whose toys. As far as I (the user) am concerned, the whole Java thing is an umanagable, deployment and maintenance-wise, mess. If I am forced to let people download and install JRE's du-jeur for each e-commerce craplet out there, this is far worse then any other "client side" app. Also as I indicated in my posts, all of these Java apps fail miserably because their purpose can be accomplished by much simplier and more reliable means: plain HTML with smart server-side processing. That would mean no client-side pandemonium for anyone. Java was hyped as a soultion to deployent of seamless, headache-less OS independent client side apps, and in my user experience it turned out to utterly fail in this area.
We actually abandoned DB2 8.x release because noone could deal with the havoc the DB2 admin tools were causing with various other retarded banking related Java apps.
There we go. The truth outs. You overpaid for a shitty product. Congratulations. You can do that in C or Fortran, too.
Besides rather flippant attidude, your thinking is simply wrong. Not only I have this problem with DB2, others have with Sun (Java's maker) admin tools and Oracle DB tools. But all of this is besides the point because the main place we use Jave in is also crap. Crap in many smelly varieties from many sources. While you might be a guru capable of writing 3D games and Self-conscious AI systems in Java, this is not what Java was advertised to us poor business sods for, and that which it was advertised for noone seems to be able to make work. And that is all I care about. Unfortunately for you, as I mentioned in another post, we the users will have the final word on this, not you in your Java 3D castle Mr.Java Wanker. Trust me on this one.
It's easy to write your web pages with object tags for the applets that will cause the appropriate JVM to be used, or trigger the install
Oh brother, This is just what I need, a 25 meg monster JRE multiplied by the number of e-commerce sites one has to visit. How about growing some brains and changing the site so it does not depend on any client-side code? Hmm? Some clever state-driven transaction process? Like many excellent sites seem to use? I do not see any advantage in even more ridiculous "plug-ins", "JRE's", "Eclipse widget kits" and all sort of assorted crap to keep track of on that Admin Clerk's computer! You of course have no idea what sort of greef this shit causes in secure thin client environments where every dude in shipping is not allowed to install JRE's (or Active X applets) willy-nilly everytime he goes to some new fandangled site. This whole Java thing is a solution looking for a problem. No, I take it back, actually it is a problem looking for a bigger yet problem to cause.
Java is all about following standards. As long as you do that, your apps run pretty well.
My, and many many many other peoples' experience with Java is quite contrary. By the way if you had read my posts you would know I dont write Java apps, I am merely made to use the fruits of labour of various banks, shipping companies, e-comerce sites etc. Accusing me of being a bad non-standard-following programmer is not going to advance this argument.
So, I guess my question is, do you guys just not follow the standards? What is it that you're doing to break your apps so much?
I follow 1 easy step: "click here to enter our e-commerce site".
In short you come here telling me about how you can (supposedly) write a single Java app that works and I am on the other hand telling you about my experience with literally tens of them from various major sources. This would lead to a simple logical conclusion (at least for me): while it is possible to write a major Java app that works (so you say) it takes some sort of Java uber-god because noone else seems to be able to do it anywhere where it counts. Which leads to the second conclusion which I described already: Java sucks for all practical purposes.
not Java fault someone wrote a shitty app using the wrong tool for the job
Technically true but how you do explain all the other shit I described with Java apps running off the web browser. Anynone barely alive in the 90's can recall chimpazee screams of Java advocates about web applets etc. This was supposed to be where Java shines and yet it is where it sucks just as bad as it does for the DB2 (and from other posts it appears Sun, Oracle etc) admin tools. Finding a non-shitty Java app seems to be like hunting for an original Picasso in one's attic.
the *only* non-secularist revolutionary-political movement today are the Jihadists.
The other one being the religious-nationalist appartheid called Israel. But thats splitting hair. I was not objecting to the fact that Jihadists are indeed religious maniacs but to the lumping of all of the different groups that do fight using guerrilla/terrorist tactics under the banner of "Jihad" on one side and "peace-loving, nice, ever-minding their own business only, secular democracies" on the other. Neither is true.
I stopped reading your "long-winded fanaticism" when I got to this point
Let me see. One of us reads the other's comments and the other one stops reading two lines in because its "fanaticsm". I dont think "fanaticsm" means what you think it means...
Israel is a secular democratic state as is every Western country
Goodness gratious, you are living in some alternate universe. Israel is defined to be a "Jewish" state. Not by me but by its founding fathers. It is in "The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel" of 1948. Unless there is a "Jewish" race (to my knowledge original Jews were Semites, just like the Palestinians and many other Arabs are) or some other clear-cut definition of a nation (all other "nations" are defined by unquestionable race/population/territory context which Isreal lacks utterly) we are talking a state whose defining element is religious. Democracy does not preclude wanton aggression as history teaches repeatedly, starting at war-mongering ancient Athens city-state and going from there all the way to adventures in Iraq. A cursory look at any independent (i.e. not written in Israel or by Isreali citizens in the USA or by opposing Arabic writers) history of events in Middle East of the last 50 years would certainly speak of what is today euphemistically called "ethnic clensing", apartheid, land grabs, annexations and destruction of property, summary punishments, etc. etc. all motivated by religious messianic fever with a healthy dose of greed and supremacist attitudes. The fact that Israel is surrounded by less then pleasant company of dictatorships and wobbly kingdoms is not an excuse to attempt to run (and annex choice chunks of) the neighourhood. I cant believe any person with even a modicum of integrity can defend blatant abuses Isreal has commited for all of these decades, on the basis that its political system is "democratic". Oh and example of how truly democratic that system is, one can find in the attempts to eliminate the voting rights of the Arab minority in Israel, in fear that its birth rate will lead to eventual majority of citizens of Israel being non-Jewish. But on the other hand one could expect that from a state that defines itself as being of one religion.
There is a war on between Jihadists and Secularists (many of whom are religious people of faith, but know that the State cannot be entrusted with such important matters).
I am afraid that you have become a victim of a Western desease known as "sound-bite mania" or gross oversimplification of issues to make them appear black/white. This is a desirable effect of indoctrination by the "media", by like minded peers but most importantly by people who benefit from such abuse of your worldview.
To look at things in more detail: your "secularists" are not. The Western camp is divided in many groups, some of them equally vicious, bloodthirsty and dangerous as the Jihadists (Israel springs to mind). Some others are willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives to play global power games or prove their pet socio-economic theories (the Neocons). Some others are willing to resort to brutal repression to keep their state (for better or worse) from fracturing into thousand pieces, a process of fragmentation which is actively encouraged by the Neocons for their purposes (Russia). That last one is particularly insideous because the Neocons (and other power hungry jackals) are actually aiding and funding the same very Jihadists they are supposedly fighting desperately elsewhere. But as they say, lust for power knows no shame. I could go on. In the other camp you have a mix of religious maniacs, desperados and people who consider themselves freedom fighters. You have nationalists who blow themselves up under a US tank in a bid to free their country and you have psychos who send teenage girls to blow themselves up in a cafe while they jostle for political power.
This of course is just but a tiny sample of the actual complexity of the issue. But you are certainly doing a disservice to everyone by over-simplyfing it and at the same time you are also furthering the agenda of various Western-borne equivalents of "Jihadists" who wish to use this as a vehicle which they will ride to ultimate global power. Be wary because the fuel for that vehicle is ignorance and blood.
AE expected the weapons to change, but not the way of warfare.
The way of warfare you described is directly related to the disparity of weaponry. Consider however that anything even remotely resembling WWIII has not occured yet, merely an insignificant (on military scale) bombing followed by minor (in terms of WWII battlefields) operations by a few countries. WWIII will come, as you accurately sense, in form of globe-spanning bacteriological or nanotech warfare. Consider this: in not so remote future it will be possible with low cost and a modicum of knowledge to produce custom genetically engineered material in a basement. I am afraid human race will have some serious questions to ask itself when the time of widely and cheaply available weapons of global mass destruction comes. All the pigheaded, religious, greedy, power-hungry shit people are doing to each other now will have a rather serious bill attached to it. Some measures will of course be taken to prevent it, like a total ban on science and total control of information people have, combined with 24/7 continuous surveilance of all individuals. But although these measures will be implemented, they will inevietably fail in stopping the attacks.
A chinese curse apparently says "May you live in Interesting Times". I am afraid that truly "Interesting Times" are just around the corner.
We install our JRE such that it's only used by our application.
This works fine and dandy if you are actually shipping an app to run stand-alone, most are however expected to function within a web browser and are downloaded piece-meal as you go from the site of the geniuses deploying them. This clearly precludes any fun with multiple JRE's (at least to my knowledge). By "shipping" JRE's I mean that they insist that we download and install their "annointed" version from their site (usually several revisions behind to whats on Sun's site). Not to mention a number of total retards using the MS JRE making the whole mess more painful. Now when I think about it the only truly stand-alone apps (not launched by the web browser) we ever run into were the DB2 ones.
You obviously never had the "pleasure" of using DB2 8.x. All of its GUI administration tools (needed for things like monitoring of the database status by non-gearheads) are Java monstrosities. And the Java stored procedures/bindings/etc are all there, luckily the application we use does not depend on that insanity so we could use its proprietary DB instead.
We moved to shipping our own JRE (increasing our disk footprint by 25 MB) and all the problems went away.
You and everybody else, the catch being that the one and only JRE version your app works with happens to be not the same one all the other apps work with. Each one of them of course demanding (and helpfully shipping) their own one and only "certified" version. Now go and explain to a poor sod like me how is that Purchase Order clerk supposed to use this crap in her web browser when she has to access yours, the bank's, the trucking company's and the overseas shipping agencies' all at the same time!
I feel a sudden inexplicable urge to strangle a Java advocate or two coming on...
The concept was indeed very promising but like most very promising concepts it soon became apparent that the devil is in the details. And what a long-horned and evil this one turned out to be!
On 32-bit windows maybe things are starting to mature and users like IgnoramusMaximus only want to bash their heads in once a week.
Unfortunately things seem not to improve in the Windows world either. As soon as one company wisens up and abandons the Java thing (after trying several iterations of faster but even more difficult to keep stable and properly deployed native widgets/accelleration/whatnot toolkits) another seem to be visited by the wandering Java snake-oil salesmen. I literally cringe every time some industrial e-comerce web site my customers deal with, suddenly announces cheerfuly that after 2 years of development their "new and impoved" e-commerce "experience" is just about ready to be deployed! Panic sets in every time because chances are that a new cycle of gnashing teeth and cries for mercy is going to play again.
No I wasnt kidding. And I am not at liberty of trying any toolkits, I do not develop these apps, I merely am in the unfortunate position of being forced to use them. So no toolkits or what not are going to help here.
That the republicans are actually left-wing and liberal in the traditional sense of the words.
You must be kidding. They are something all right but left-wing? Liberal? I dont think these labels apply to any of the two heads of this duopoly. I admit I have some serious left-leanings in some places (social infrastructure of the society, medical care, schools and limited oversight of the markets), while adhering to what could be described conservative views (smallest possible, efficient, fiscally responsible government, simplification of law, deregulation of non-life-threatening industries, free-but-not-insane markets, etc). So as a leftie I can tell you this: Liberal goes contrary to Patriot Act. Tax breaks for the wealthy goes contrary to left-wing social policies. etc. On the other hand "more powers for Homeland Security" sounds more right-wing and yet it comes from the Democrats. From my leftist perspective, they both swerved hard to the right with the notable exception of the fiscal responsibility part. That I admit, the Republicans seem to have borrowed from the worst excesses of some misguided left-wing governments of the past. The whole landscape seems to represent worst combinations possible as far as both left and right wing onlookers are concerned. And that is some kind of record I think.
Interesting. Last time I've used jEdit, the memory used was indicated in the bottom right of the window, and it didn't rise over 6 megs.
I was being facetious. The actual requirements for jEdit are probably less then 64MB, note however that jEdit is tiny compared to the apps we must use, the memory usage it shows does not include the VM itself (look at the tasklist instead of what jEdit tells you, windows heap analysis tools are also helpful in this) and unlike regular Windows apps, the OS does not understand.jar libraries and thus does not share them among tasks. DLL's are normally only loaded once and shared among tasks/users (while being in a CPU-protected read-only memory area). It appears (at least from our experience) that each instance of a Java VM's tends to allocate copious amounts of memory for these libraries. Therefore with increasing number of instances, any serious Java app will quickly outpace native one in memory usage due to the needles duplication of these areas. Also jEdit is being showcased as a model of a well-written Java app, something I find nearly as elusive as the Iraqi WMDs.
He couldn't be deterred from supporting the freeloaders, he felt our company had some sort of duty to support them just because the had bought the stuff from us at some point in the distant past.
That is because he understood this whole capitalism thing the way it is innately understood by those who are idealists. As in when you buy something you actually own it. As if companies which sell stuff are "honor bound" to stand behind their product and that in the long run it will pay off by creating stellar reputation and thus making their brand name a synonim for "superior". You know, the kind of companies we all would like to deal with instead of the "throw-away-made-to-break-crap", "image over quality", "consumers" instead of "customers", rent-instead-of-own CDMA-style crap that we put up with every day. Curiously, when you work on the inside of one of those places, long-time, early-adopting customers who probably sufferred brunt of the early half-baked products become
"free-loaders". Fancy that. I wonder if it has something to do with that car that crapped out 2 months after purchase or that PC where all the fans are creaking after 4 months of use. I wonder indeed. Maybe that Russian dude, who you admit was brilliant "otherwise", was also right on this one?
but you don't see me strutting around like I'm using God's own language!
I think there is something specially weird about these Java priests. I have seen people exhibiting unhealthy attachment to some tools or languages, but nothing even approaching the amount of zealotry Java seems to produce. Well maybe except the Emacs/Vi war but that at least had some comedic elements. Java worshippers on the other hand are indeed appearing to believe they somehow discovered some secret source of mojo and the Ultimate And Final Way You Shalt Speaketh To Yer Computer. They seem completely oblivious to the fact that like any other computer language, Java has major shortcomings. Additionally, because it was hyped and targetted at a particular class of applications where (in my and other users experience) it performed abysmally, it has become a dirty word along with other "revolutionary" ideas like Lotus Notes, Object-Oriented Databases, etc. All promising to be magical fairies who will cure all your computing problems with a wave of a wand, and instead turning out to be beer-bellied, hygiene deficient, ugliest-ever men in drag wielding an axe.
I dont give a damn about Metronomes and speech recognition of questionable usefulnes. None of those are Java apps I deal with. And of those I deal with all suck.
worm-friendly apps?
Speaking of security, most Java apps are deployed in places that need them not in the first place, as a kludge for an E-Commerce site or electronic banking interface which can be done with a bit of thinking in plain HTML. Others, like IBMs for example, are mainly administrative tools which have no communication abilities outside of their narrow scope. These, if made in any other language would not be any more prone to worms. As a matter of fact, the use of Java on some of these electronic commerce sites introduces unneeded complexity and results in code executing on customer's computers whereby they become prone to being abused by spoofed/buggy VM's etc.
So, great story, but not exactly correlated with reality.
Reality? Oh dear. Listen dude, I am telling you as a user of your wonderful computer science masturbation effort otherwise known as Java: No. Nada. Niet. It aint a go. No can do. The bank we deal with is rewriting their apps to be java-free because of the amount of flaq they are getting (and no they are not going to that other aberration known as C# either). IBM DB2 is banned in many companies we deal with. Etc etc. We, the users, not you, Mr. Java Wanker, have the final word on this. Trust me.
Slashdot Mirror
I will keep repeating ad nauseum that those are the only applications that count to me and many businesses that use them. That is a 100% of a sample of a Java apps that are shitty. Either all of those were written by poeple have no clue what they are doing (unlike all of those wonderful mythical apps always deployed somewhere else and written by enlightened geniuses) or the Java snake oil is just that.
and I am starting to wonder how much experience you have in general, because what I'm conspicuously not hearing is X and Y and Z systems are way better for A and B and C. Just vague generalities about HTML forms and (I think?) coding in C? Or do you perhaps favor VBScript?
Since you are getting more incredibly fanatical and blind by the minute, let me spell it out for you as clear as I can:
For e-commerce, OS/browser agnostic plain HTML on the browser is the only sane way to do anything because it does not rely on any client capablities other then ability to render HTML. No deployment issues, no maintanance costs. Java (and ActiveX and C# and similarly retarded ideas) is a way to create deployment issues and thus support costs and thus employment for countless Java tweaker monkeys. Something dear to your heart no doubt.
For applications that must run on thick-clients (I sure hope due to CPU usage because any other reason in a corporation is plain retarded) one can use native code just fine because: vast majority if C or C++ or any other language programs need only to support very few platforms in their entire life span and the effort to optimize that program for these platforms is well paid for by removal of integration and thus support issues. But such need is extremely rare because vast majority never leave a single platform. A Windows Java app will never run as well as a native Windows app neither will unix Java app run as well as a native unix app. This is not even up for discussion. The most convoluted of JITs and what nots are still overhead over native code and I will not even entertain any moronic discussion on that topic no more that I will entertain discussions of how you can make 2 and 2 equal 7.
I regret to inform you that you are full of shit.
I regret to inform you that you are just a priest of yet another silly language who has no clue who pays his bills. VB apps are everywhere in business, far more so then Java ones. These numbers are representing current jobs, corresponding to a peak in a cycle of a fad, VB waning hard (previous fad), Java peaking (current fad) and C# just coming up. I am fully expecting to have this very same retarded conversation with a C# priest, in, oh about 4 years time.
You sound confused. Are you saying it's easier or cheaper to write native applications? That natives are more secure? Are you happy with all your current native applications?
No it is you who is utterly confused, something about a theory whereby the Earth is flat and supported by Java beans. To spell it out for you again (I will resist an urge to use large letters): Native apps are easier to write (many decades of experience and tools), run better (many decades of OS design and integration of apps with the OS), cheaper to write and support because they use proven framework and tools, they integrate well with the user environment, have better performance (even the not so well written ones) and the so called "write once, deploy everywhere" is not only unnecessary but is more accurately described as "write once, debug and crash everywhere". Are they more secure? Depends what kind. The "no client side, java-less, HTML only e-commerce"? Most certainly. The locally deployed, locally networking native apps? They are not any more vulnerable then the OS itself. Are we clear now, Your Beanness?
nobody sees the world ending but you, all those students and professors, all those magazines and newswpapers and Fortune 500 compan
Quite true although it is not humanly possible to have more hype, hot air and hubris in any other language other then Java, C# being second close contender. Why if one were to listen to what we are being told, one cant possibly write bad code in Java for the language is divine and one's hand is guided with certainty by the fairies of object-oriented-pointerless-bliss.
Yes I did, it said something about AWT, Swing and mentioned the term "slow as molasses". Which fits nicely with my example.
Go explain it to all those salesmen from Sun who were running around in the .com bubble times claiming that this is the type of application Java was meant for
Still hammering on the straw man. How many apps does "all" stand for, by the way? In total? Less than a dozen? Less than 6?
At any particular time in a given company there typically around 4-5 critically important for business and totally frustrating ones in simultenaous use although accross various companies I deal with there is probably over 30 and more if you add the abandoned and aborted ones we manged to talk people out of (sometimes under a threat of moving the bank account somewhere else for example). Note that these are all real-life business apps and not games, "test" or "reference" ones. In real life this is the only thing that counts.
Go on, genocide Java, and force everyone to write applications in C or PHP or something, with HTML forms.
Risking being repetetive: HTML with server side is the only sane and truly OS/browser agnostic way of writing e-commerce applications which is what we see Java used in business for and which is what Java was hyped for by Sun.
So, how many simulatneous VM instances do you typically run at once, comrade?
On a win2k thin-client system (used by people who care about things like TCO and not latest fads in languages), each user has one or more.
notice you crumpled immediately on your implied claim that it was impossible deal with the latency issue in the client.
No I merely mocked you because your Quake 3D Java clone is a laughable excercise in futility running slower then original, consuming vast amounts of memory compared to original and not in the slightest more portable then original. Wake me up when all the major game makers start shipping all of their games exclusively in Java and do not get lynched by their customers.
Java justifiably huge, important, and ubiquitous,
Nowhere near the size of VB for example (not that I am advocating VB). What is huge, ubiquitous and justifiably so are native applications which luckily outnumber Java ones 10000:1. Also Java is absolutely most important when it comes to hype although given time I am sure MS will take that crown with its own nonsense of C#. In the meantime the world will keep on turning and there will be us the users with the same "old and boring" native apps loong after the fizzle went out of this latest hype dot-bomb known as Java.
You clearly do not follow what I was saying. I was being funny when I mentioned "flipping a bit". What I was really referring to is the object-oriented-everything-paradigm libraries that make Java such a dog for all practical purposes. Speaking of your example, I am sure that in most OO-zealot written apps this is more like (in my funky pseudo-code):
Or some such.
Good for you. I hope that your users share that opinion instead of just the developers. If your organization is anything like the ones I work with, you might be suprised what management/developers believe "works as a champ" versus what the word (usually a 4-letter one) on the subject in the trenches is...
Yes I am. Meaning I am the person who pays the bills that make your dicking around with Java possible
Probably on a windows box
Mostly on win2k servers in thin-client corporate environments
Probably crawling with viruses, worms, trojans, and all the other devils inflicted regularly
Err... no. There is no trojans, virii and any other sort of malware on these servers, primarilly because I prevent users from installing things like... Java JRE's de-jeur and ActiveX infectware.
on noobs like you.
I am afraid you werent born when I was a "noob" in computing. As a matter of fact the word "noob" wasnt coined yet.
What a moron. Go back to your living room, your television is lonely.
And this my friend precisely sums up the wisdom and maturity of most vocal of Java advocates. It also quite clearly highlights which one of us is serous and which one hacks "1337 uBeR jaVa ApPz" on mom's PC.
there are a thousand "super-efficient" .jar libraries required by a "Hello World" app
No.
Well it certainly feels that way when you try to load those apps. They all have excruciating startup times. Perheaps I am wrong and instead they check the integrity of my bank account or weather in China for my convenience. I dont really care, but 5-6 seconds of startup for a few boxes of interactive input is not really acceptable.
it takes 12 objects instantiated in 4 containers to flip a bit in a byte
Oh, I see. You're flipping bytes.
I do not write Jave apps but I am quite familiar with OOP and also with the great zeal Java disciples apply it to everything. Like every other paradigm, one-size-fits-all applied to extremes allways results in the effects I described. My comment was to illustrate that if you go nuts and have hundreds of objetcs, events and containers all over the place, you are bound to end up with huge overhead. This is not restricted to Java by any means and many a C++ library suffers from the same issues. Java from what my (cursory I admit) glance at the language/libraries takes this to just such extremes.
there is the substitution of native performance of compiled code to code compiled "Just Too Late" combined with exceptional memory usage that entails
The "Just Too Late" was just a pun on the hype JIT is endowed with. The memory requirement (if you had read the thread where the original post was made) was confirmed by just about anybody including those who advocate Java. As I explained in there, if you have a 10-15 meg per JRE + 10-50 (memory managment seems to suck badly for the apps we use) per instance of an application (no way an OS can share DLLs or .so's here) in a multi-user environment, and this caused by 4 lines of input, ridiculous e-commerce apps, one has problems. Remember, I am not a Java theorist. Merely a user of apps written in your favourite cure-all language.
multiple, insideously incompatible with each other, versions of the so-called "universal" VM
Yes, leaving aside the fact that Microsoft deliberately broke VM compatibility. Not just in one or two big ways. In a lot of little ways. As in on purpose. Great example. Very honest
I dont care who broke whose toys. As far as I (the user) am concerned, the whole Java thing is an umanagable, deployment and maintenance-wise, mess. If I am forced to let people download and install JRE's du-jeur for each e-commerce craplet out there, this is far worse then any other "client side" app. Also as I indicated in my posts, all of these Java apps fail miserably because their purpose can be accomplished by much simplier and more reliable means: plain HTML with smart server-side processing. That would mean no client-side pandemonium for anyone. Java was hyped as a soultion to deployent of seamless, headache-less OS independent client side apps, and in my user experience it turned out to utterly fail in this area.
We actually abandoned DB2 8.x release because noone could deal with the havoc the DB2 admin tools were causing with various other retarded banking related Java apps.
There we go. The truth outs. You overpaid for a shitty product. Congratulations. You can do that in C or Fortran, too.
Besides rather flippant attidude, your thinking is simply wrong. Not only I have this problem with DB2, others have with Sun (Java's maker) admin tools and Oracle DB tools. But all of this is besides the point because the main place we use Jave in is also crap. Crap in many smelly varieties from many sources. While you might be a guru capable of writing 3D games and Self-conscious AI systems in Java, this is not what Java was advertised to us poor business sods for, and that which it was advertised for noone seems to be able to make work. And that is all I care about. Unfortunately for you, as I mentioned in another post, we the users will have the final word on this, not you in your Java 3D castle Mr.Java Wanker. Trust me on this one.
Oh brother, This is just what I need, a 25 meg monster JRE multiplied by the number of e-commerce sites one has to visit. How about growing some brains and changing the site so it does not depend on any client-side code? Hmm? Some clever state-driven transaction process? Like many excellent sites seem to use? I do not see any advantage in even more ridiculous "plug-ins", "JRE's", "Eclipse widget kits" and all sort of assorted crap to keep track of on that Admin Clerk's computer! You of course have no idea what sort of greef this shit causes in secure thin client environments where every dude in shipping is not allowed to install JRE's (or Active X applets) willy-nilly everytime he goes to some new fandangled site. This whole Java thing is a solution looking for a problem. No, I take it back, actually it is a problem looking for a bigger yet problem to cause.
My, and many many many other peoples' experience with Java is quite contrary. By the way if you had read my posts you would know I dont write Java apps, I am merely made to use the fruits of labour of various banks, shipping companies, e-comerce sites etc. Accusing me of being a bad non-standard-following programmer is not going to advance this argument.
So, I guess my question is, do you guys just not follow the standards? What is it that you're doing to break your apps so much?
I follow 1 easy step: "click here to enter our e-commerce site".
In short you come here telling me about how you can (supposedly) write a single Java app that works and I am on the other hand telling you about my experience with literally tens of them from various major sources. This would lead to a simple logical conclusion (at least for me): while it is possible to write a major Java app that works (so you say) it takes some sort of Java uber-god because noone else seems to be able to do it anywhere where it counts. Which leads to the second conclusion which I described already: Java sucks for all practical purposes.
Technically true but how you do explain all the other shit I described with Java apps running off the web browser. Anynone barely alive in the 90's can recall chimpazee screams of Java advocates about web applets etc. This was supposed to be where Java shines and yet it is where it sucks just as bad as it does for the DB2 (and from other posts it appears Sun, Oracle etc) admin tools. Finding a non-shitty Java app seems to be like hunting for an original Picasso in one's attic.
The other one being the religious-nationalist appartheid called Israel. But thats splitting hair. I was not objecting to the fact that Jihadists are indeed religious maniacs but to the lumping of all of the different groups that do fight using guerrilla/terrorist tactics under the banner of "Jihad" on one side and "peace-loving, nice, ever-minding their own business only, secular democracies" on the other. Neither is true.
Let me see. One of us reads the other's comments and the other one stops reading two lines in because its "fanaticsm". I dont think "fanaticsm" means what you think it means...
Israel is a secular democratic state as is every Western country
Goodness gratious, you are living in some alternate universe. Israel is defined to be a "Jewish" state. Not by me but by its founding fathers. It is in "The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel" of 1948. Unless there is a "Jewish" race (to my knowledge original Jews were Semites, just like the Palestinians and many other Arabs are) or some other clear-cut definition of a nation (all other "nations" are defined by unquestionable race/population/territory context which Isreal lacks utterly) we are talking a state whose defining element is religious. Democracy does not preclude wanton aggression as history teaches repeatedly, starting at war-mongering ancient Athens city-state and going from there all the way to adventures in Iraq. A cursory look at any independent (i.e. not written in Israel or by Isreali citizens in the USA or by opposing Arabic writers) history of events in Middle East of the last 50 years would certainly speak of what is today euphemistically called "ethnic clensing", apartheid, land grabs, annexations and destruction of property, summary punishments, etc. etc. all motivated by religious messianic fever with a healthy dose of greed and supremacist attitudes. The fact that Israel is surrounded by less then pleasant company of dictatorships and wobbly kingdoms is not an excuse to attempt to run (and annex choice chunks of) the neighourhood. I cant believe any person with even a modicum of integrity can defend blatant abuses Isreal has commited for all of these decades, on the basis that its political system is "democratic". Oh and example of how truly democratic that system is, one can find in the attempts to eliminate the voting rights of the Arab minority in Israel, in fear that its birth rate will lead to eventual majority of citizens of Israel being non-Jewish. But on the other hand one could expect that from a state that defines itself as being of one religion.
I am afraid that you have become a victim of a Western desease known as "sound-bite mania" or gross oversimplification of issues to make them appear black/white. This is a desirable effect of indoctrination by the "media", by like minded peers but most importantly by people who benefit from such abuse of your worldview.
To look at things in more detail: your "secularists" are not. The Western camp is divided in many groups, some of them equally vicious, bloodthirsty and dangerous as the Jihadists (Israel springs to mind). Some others are willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives to play global power games or prove their pet socio-economic theories (the Neocons). Some others are willing to resort to brutal repression to keep their state (for better or worse) from fracturing into thousand pieces, a process of fragmentation which is actively encouraged by the Neocons for their purposes (Russia). That last one is particularly insideous because the Neocons (and other power hungry jackals) are actually aiding and funding the same very Jihadists they are supposedly fighting desperately elsewhere. But as they say, lust for power knows no shame. I could go on. In the other camp you have a mix of religious maniacs, desperados and people who consider themselves freedom fighters. You have nationalists who blow themselves up under a US tank in a bid to free their country and you have psychos who send teenage girls to blow themselves up in a cafe while they jostle for political power.
This of course is just but a tiny sample of the actual complexity of the issue. But you are certainly doing a disservice to everyone by over-simplyfing it and at the same time you are also furthering the agenda of various Western-borne equivalents of "Jihadists" who wish to use this as a vehicle which they will ride to ultimate global power. Be wary because the fuel for that vehicle is ignorance and blood.
The way of warfare you described is directly related to the disparity of weaponry. Consider however that anything even remotely resembling WWIII has not occured yet, merely an insignificant (on military scale) bombing followed by minor (in terms of WWII battlefields) operations by a few countries. WWIII will come, as you accurately sense, in form of globe-spanning bacteriological or nanotech warfare. Consider this: in not so remote future it will be possible with low cost and a modicum of knowledge to produce custom genetically engineered material in a basement. I am afraid human race will have some serious questions to ask itself when the time of widely and cheaply available weapons of global mass destruction comes. All the pigheaded, religious, greedy, power-hungry shit people are doing to each other now will have a rather serious bill attached to it. Some measures will of course be taken to prevent it, like a total ban on science and total control of information people have, combined with 24/7 continuous surveilance of all individuals. But although these measures will be implemented, they will inevietably fail in stopping the attacks.
A chinese curse apparently says "May you live in Interesting Times". I am afraid that truly "Interesting Times" are just around the corner.
This works fine and dandy if you are actually shipping an app to run stand-alone, most are however expected to function within a web browser and are downloaded piece-meal as you go from the site of the geniuses deploying them. This clearly precludes any fun with multiple JRE's (at least to my knowledge). By "shipping" JRE's I mean that they insist that we download and install their "annointed" version from their site (usually several revisions behind to whats on Sun's site). Not to mention a number of total retards using the MS JRE making the whole mess more painful. Now when I think about it the only truly stand-alone apps (not launched by the web browser) we ever run into were the DB2 ones.
You obviously never had the "pleasure" of using DB2 8.x. All of its GUI administration tools (needed for things like monitoring of the database status by non-gearheads) are Java monstrosities. And the Java stored procedures/bindings/etc are all there, luckily the application we use does not depend on that insanity so we could use its proprietary DB instead.
You and everybody else, the catch being that the one and only JRE version your app works with happens to be not the same one all the other apps work with. Each one of them of course demanding (and helpfully shipping) their own one and only "certified" version. Now go and explain to a poor sod like me how is that Purchase Order clerk supposed to use this crap in her web browser when she has to access yours, the bank's, the trucking company's and the overseas shipping agencies' all at the same time!
I feel a sudden inexplicable urge to strangle a Java advocate or two coming on...
The concept was indeed very promising but like most very promising concepts it soon became apparent that the devil is in the details. And what a long-horned and evil this one turned out to be!
On 32-bit windows maybe things are starting to mature and users like IgnoramusMaximus only want to bash their heads in once a week.
Unfortunately things seem not to improve in the Windows world either. As soon as one company wisens up and abandons the Java thing (after trying several iterations of faster but even more difficult to keep stable and properly deployed native widgets/accelleration/whatnot toolkits) another seem to be visited by the wandering Java snake-oil salesmen. I literally cringe every time some industrial e-comerce web site my customers deal with, suddenly announces cheerfuly that after 2 years of development their "new and impoved" e-commerce "experience" is just about ready to be deployed! Panic sets in every time because chances are that a new cycle of gnashing teeth and cries for mercy is going to play again.
No I wasnt kidding. And I am not at liberty of trying any toolkits, I do not develop these apps, I merely am in the unfortunate position of being forced to use them. So no toolkits or what not are going to help here.
You must be kidding. They are something all right but left-wing? Liberal? I dont think these labels apply to any of the two heads of this duopoly. I admit I have some serious left-leanings in some places (social infrastructure of the society, medical care, schools and limited oversight of the markets), while adhering to what could be described conservative views (smallest possible, efficient, fiscally responsible government, simplification of law, deregulation of non-life-threatening industries, free-but-not-insane markets, etc). So as a leftie I can tell you this: Liberal goes contrary to Patriot Act. Tax breaks for the wealthy goes contrary to left-wing social policies. etc. On the other hand "more powers for Homeland Security" sounds more right-wing and yet it comes from the Democrats. From my leftist perspective, they both swerved hard to the right with the notable exception of the fiscal responsibility part. That I admit, the Republicans seem to have borrowed from the worst excesses of some misguided left-wing governments of the past. The whole landscape seems to represent worst combinations possible as far as both left and right wing onlookers are concerned. And that is some kind of record I think.
I was being facetious. The actual requirements for jEdit are probably less then 64MB, note however that jEdit is tiny compared to the apps we must use, the memory usage it shows does not include the VM itself (look at the tasklist instead of what jEdit tells you, windows heap analysis tools are also helpful in this) and unlike regular Windows apps, the OS does not understand .jar libraries and thus does not share them among tasks. DLL's are normally only loaded once and shared among tasks/users (while being in a CPU-protected read-only memory area). It appears (at least from our experience) that each instance of a Java VM's tends to allocate copious amounts of memory for these libraries. Therefore with increasing number of instances, any serious Java app will quickly outpace native one in memory usage due to the needles duplication of these areas. Also jEdit is being showcased as a model of a well-written Java app, something I find nearly as elusive as the Iraqi WMDs.
That is because he understood this whole capitalism thing the way it is innately understood by those who are idealists. As in when you buy something you actually own it. As if companies which sell stuff are "honor bound" to stand behind their product and that in the long run it will pay off by creating stellar reputation and thus making their brand name a synonim for "superior". You know, the kind of companies we all would like to deal with instead of the "throw-away-made-to-break-crap", "image over quality", "consumers" instead of "customers", rent-instead-of-own CDMA-style crap that we put up with every day. Curiously, when you work on the inside of one of those places, long-time, early-adopting customers who probably sufferred brunt of the early half-baked products become "free-loaders". Fancy that. I wonder if it has something to do with that car that crapped out 2 months after purchase or that PC where all the fans are creaking after 4 months of use. I wonder indeed. Maybe that Russian dude, who you admit was brilliant "otherwise", was also right on this one?
I think there is something specially weird about these Java priests. I have seen people exhibiting unhealthy attachment to some tools or languages, but nothing even approaching the amount of zealotry Java seems to produce. Well maybe except the Emacs/Vi war but that at least had some comedic elements. Java worshippers on the other hand are indeed appearing to believe they somehow discovered some secret source of mojo and the Ultimate And Final Way You Shalt Speaketh To Yer Computer. They seem completely oblivious to the fact that like any other computer language, Java has major shortcomings. Additionally, because it was hyped and targetted at a particular class of applications where (in my and other users experience) it performed abysmally, it has become a dirty word along with other "revolutionary" ideas like Lotus Notes, Object-Oriented Databases, etc. All promising to be magical fairies who will cure all your computing problems with a wave of a wand, and instead turning out to be beer-bellied, hygiene deficient, ugliest-ever men in drag wielding an axe.
I dont give a damn about Metronomes and speech recognition of questionable usefulnes. None of those are Java apps I deal with. And of those I deal with all suck.
worm-friendly apps?
Speaking of security, most Java apps are deployed in places that need them not in the first place, as a kludge for an E-Commerce site or electronic banking interface which can be done with a bit of thinking in plain HTML. Others, like IBMs for example, are mainly administrative tools which have no communication abilities outside of their narrow scope. These, if made in any other language would not be any more prone to worms. As a matter of fact, the use of Java on some of these electronic commerce sites introduces unneeded complexity and results in code executing on customer's computers whereby they become prone to being abused by spoofed/buggy VM's etc.
So, great story, but not exactly correlated with reality.
Reality? Oh dear. Listen dude, I am telling you as a user of your wonderful computer science masturbation effort otherwise known as Java: No. Nada. Niet. It aint a go. No can do. The bank we deal with is rewriting their apps to be java-free because of the amount of flaq they are getting (and no they are not going to that other aberration known as C# either). IBM DB2 is banned in many companies we deal with. Etc etc. We, the users, not you, Mr. Java Wanker, have the final word on this. Trust me.