> I can't blame you though, there are things far more important in India that keyloggers, still saying this is not Orwellian shows a monumental ignorance about 1984 and other works of Mr Orwell.
I have read 1984 in full and regard it as one of the most important political works as well as understand its roots in real events of the last century. Not sure what one needs to do to be considered to be not "monumentally" ignorant about it by your standards.
I am not saying we have more important things to worry about. Actually, keylogger level privacy intrusion are intolerable to any democracy. What I am saying is that there is not likely a grand scheme on this. As soon as it hit the press, it will be struck down at the first legal challenge. Nor is this a national measure. It is likely something that a local police chief got ill advised through poor council (The nut in question is Vijay Mukhi - President of Foundation for Information Security and Technology). Indian public services is not technology savvy despite all the stuff you hear about e-governance (and please, don't draw comparison to trains that are late).
I think we can have the patience to at least wait and see if it actually gets implemented.
* The compiler is wickedly fast and is really good at producing compact executables.
> If it's using gcc to do the code generation, then Gnat (which also uses gcc) should do the same job. I don't know about other compilers.
I think all your other points are quite valid. Ada was always a better specified language.
GPC (GCC), Lazarus, Virtual Pascal and Delphi are different compilers. GPC may be comparable to Gnat (I only had passing experience with it). Delphi is arguably the fastest native compiler I have seen. Certainly beats the GCC implementation of Ada in that aspect. From my memory, FreePascal was faster as well. Ada does a lot more checks on the code than Pascal does and will likely be a bit slower anyway.
> 1. The standardized language was very small, so there was a tendency for it to fracture into many incompatible languages.
Small is relative. Pascal language is now Object Pascal. It is not a small language.
> 2. At that time, the implementations represented a string as a length byte followed by the string data, so you were limited to strings of length 255.
Delphi and FreePascal have PChar as well as AnsiString.
> 3. I don't think there was any (standard) way to defeat the strong typing in cases where you needed to.
Delphi and I believe FreePascal support the Variant data type (ala VB). So you do get weak typing when you need it. This is used for runtime COM and for cleanly interfacing with dynamic languages. Python for Delphi uses this with much success.
> 4. Was there garbage collection? If so, I don't recall it as being an idiomatic part of the language, except maybe for strings...? Well, most languages back then didn't have it (and gc's sucked back then, so gc languages tended to be slow), but today...
There are Pascals that target VMs (Java/.NET). In fact Delphi for.NET is just that.
> 5. I was always annoyed by the gotchas in the syntax -- the language seemed unnecessarily picky about periods and semicolons.
I would not call it a gotcha but needs a bit of getting used to for someone from a C/C++ background. That remains.
> Has any of this changed? Has modern pascal settled on a single standardized version of the language?
Borland's implementation is still considered the standard.
> Is gc easy, idiomatic, and consistently supported in libraries and language constructs?
Delphi for.NET is just as well integrated as C# and VB.NET are.
> Is there good unicode support?
I recall Delphi doing that quite well. Don't have much experience on that.
> It seems to me that today, if I wanted a typesafe language I'd use java, and if I wanted a language that compiled to native code I'd use C or OCaml.
Modern Pascal compares favorably with C++.
It's not about the language per se. FreePascal and Delphi offer great tools and libraries for certain types of tasks. OCaml is great as a language but is still considered an academic language. It does not have great tools or a comprehensive community compared to Delphi. For building native high performance GUIs with good OS integration and plenty of functionality, Delphi remains to be the most productive way to go with thousands of drag and drop widgets - both free open source as well as commercial. Currently Delphi for Win32 is the only real option to build native GUIs for Windows since MS has steered its RAD tool development towards.NET. Lazarus has still ways to go but is usable now.
I take that back. I just put together a keylogger to test. On-Screen Keyboard does send keystroke events that can be monitored by a keylogger. It is a generic keyboard replacement after all.
How about typing the entire alphabet first and copy paste the desired ones?
Seriously, as an Indian - this is not Orwellian as it might appear. Just a case of some bureaucratic nut who just discovered key loggers coming up with these impractical ideas.
"Never, never blame anything on a conspiracy that can be explained by incompetence."
It does not have to be about games. Compiz and Beryl have drawn enough attention. That is not necessarily a trivial market. Geeks buy the latest cards. Geeks do care about these new desktops. I did not care too much about the brand for my last card. My next video card was surely going to be NVidia just for this reason. Now that choice may change.
BTW, others have pointed that Doom and Unreal series are cross platform. These may be few by themselves. But quite a few games use these engines. If Linux 3D isn't tricky, there might be adequate market for these engine users to support Linux without too much additional trouble.
As someone who created them in native code through Delphi, I am perfectly aware of that. When over 10 years pass in IT sector, you can't get perfect comparisons. Just focus on the similarities rather than the differences please. The point being that I was naive at the time and focussed on the short term benefits of libraries, features, fast execution and familiar tools that ActiveX afforded rather than look at the bigger picture and overriding disadvantages of security compromises and lack of portability. BTW, you can get ActiveX to work in Mozilla and even on Linux but only after jumping through hoops. That is pretty much the picture today with Mono with programs authored by devs who haven't thought early about portability. MS has no business incentive to properly support Linux and other OSes. Adopting this technology will always be a risky proposition if you care about portability. I have no doubt though that it will be a more productive tool to develop in. MS tools usually are.
> Silverlight is not only the presentation forms (whichis also goos), but you can transparently use databases, manipulate and parse HTLM, wire handler events for HTML, excellent communication capabilities, and a lot more. IMO everything is more powerful/organized than the flash conteirpart.... Way to go!
That's what I thought too when ActiveX first came out. We all know where that went. If it comes down to needing those features I will take JavaFX.
> Regardless, the (grand)parent poster is an ass. Having faith in something is analogous to heroin? Please.
You can substitute cheese cake in the argument if you find heroin offensive. Although, I find using a substance that causes dependence more apt in a comparison. People find it very hard to back out of faith even when compelling reason is shown.
> Unlike a cow, an employee can tell the employer to go and take a running jump, as any sane person would.
The same argument can be used for any discrimination (race, gender, sexual orientation). After all they can all go work for someone who is OK with the stereotype. What makes you think this is more defensible than those? What reasonable arguments exist to warrant coerced surgery and invasive of privacy for management needs that can be done away with a compulsory name tag with RFID.
> Now that we'll soon see the post office being held liable for every mail bomb delivered. > Hey, why not? It's exactly the same. They mustn't look what's inside and are liable for it.
Because it is not the same. "The proposal does NOT entail that ISPs will be called upon to hunt down file-sharers."
They are required to look. It only says they are, if the proof (which is hard) is shown to them and they refuse to take action. A better (but silly and impractical) example is asking the postal dept to block mail sent by xyz because he/she is mass mailing copies of copyrighted material.
That's beside point of the lack of sensibility of these DMCA style takedown demands.
I followed the HelloWorld walkthrough in Europa just to check. Everything is fine here. It must be something at your end.
> Editor works, build again.
What do you mean by "build again"? In Eclipse, you don't need to do that. It auto builds in a background thread as you type.
> NullPointerException
It is usually a common beginner problem for Java as they try Hello World (including myself several years ago). It usually means that the Java classpath is not properly configured with the current folder in it. However, Eclipse takes care of that. So, can't say in your case. Consult the Eclipse channel and provide more info.
> If this is the case, how come shaolin kung-fu masters aren't winning UFC championships and such?
Ai yai yai. One of those YouTube arguments again? Shaolin Kung Fu is a "Martial" art. It was designed for the battle field (albeit in a firearm free era). There have been historical instances where the monks used their art to fight entire army (shaolin temple was destroyed when the army was not happy with the outcome of the first match and declared a rematch - without telling the monks first) and yes, pirates (despite an abundance of pirate jokes on this thread). The art itself has little to prove. However, it is not optimized for ring fighting (just like "powerful grappling" is when your opponents have spears, swords and bows) although it certainly had been used for the same. Besides, no single martial art style can win MMA style matches anymore. MMA is kind of a unique style now optimized for that rule sets.
Historically, most martial arts were meant to be used in conjunction with weapons (anything else was not practical at that time). In modern times, where the said weapons have lost relevance, we mostly use the unarmed aspects of the styles. Shaolin monks were great because these spiritual nerds trained early, trained a lot and trained to save their skin. Anyone who spends that much time in any rich martial art is bound to be awesome. The modern monks are mostly performers that the Chinese govt sanctioned after the success of the movies of the temple.
> There's no reason a clever ninja couldn't have also come up with clever techniques to beat monks as well.
Sure, Ninja's were said to kill silently - and that can be done on anyone. But one thing they never did was have challenge matches.
Is 26 GigaFlops significant anymore? I hear that the PS3 can do 20-25 from Folding@Home people. And it is only about a 5th the price. But I hear so many different numbers that I can no longer make sense of them. Why do they bother comparing with DeepBlue, an over 10 yr old super computer? Can anyone with a PS3 can report what their PS3 with Yellow Dog Linux is doing? And what are the numbers for the latest desktop processors? Any recommendations on software to benchmark in flops for my own computers?
>> It is just wrong to expect an end user for a PVR to even know what a database is > No offense, but that's fucking idiotic. If you're building a DIY PVR, and you decide to build it on top of Linux, it behooves you to understand the basics of system administration.
That bigotic "Those dumb users" mindset especially when basic usability testing is lacking is actually offensive. Don't know about you or what a majority of MythTV users do, but I DON'T build dedicated PVRs. I installed a PVR software on my desktop, let it run while I left for work and watched after I got back. I DO know how to administer databases. I just don't think it should come down to that for an entertainment app. Especially when that part can be automated and abstracted away.
> This includes how to run a mysql database, among other things. Or were you just expecting the system to magically auto-maintain itself?
Actually, yes. What do you think EVERY other PVR software expects you to do?
> it might be a chore for the non-technical user > still, the average enthusiast should not find it too difficult.
It can be a chore for anybody. A non-technical should not even touch it. I have been using Linux for at least 6 years now (both desktop and servers). Not exactly a newbie. Although most of my problems were related to poor compatibility of my tuner card at the time. But I was annoyed with other aspects of the install as well. People have varying luck with MythTV. For some, it just works and they never go back.
> I think I'm just going to use CentOS or Ubuntu (the LTS edition - long-term support) and pull MythTV from one of the popular repositories.
Because many of us already tried that and couldn't get it to work. MythTV is one of the worst software I had to set up. It is just wrong to expect an end user for a PVR to even know what a database is, let alone having to set it up and deal with the error messages, even if it something popular such as MySQL. MythTV just needs to be as easy as the commercial packages to setup.
> When was the last time you looked at Swing. Swing is very good performancewise nowdays.
I didn't benchmark anything but I don't think that Swing got much better performance wise. It is the machines that have become fast enough to handle Swing. Swing in the latest JDK (1.6 update 2) still sucks on my AMD XP 2000+. But it is very acceptable on any dual core.
> What specifically is your gripe about the wicket plug in?
What gripe? I don't have any. My point is that ASP.NET is not comparable to Wicket. It's like comparing Delphi to Eclipse with a C++ plugin. Both will do the job. The development experience is nowhere similar.
1. Can you drag and drop widgets into a WYSIWYG page designer and set properties in a Wicket plugin? 2. Can you find (free or commercial) the same spectrum of third party components that will also show up in your workbench? 3. Can you visually compose compound components? 4. Does wicket support data binding like ASP.NET as well as have visual tools for the same?
> It's funny you say that. I think VMWare is probably the best way to run Windows. You can use the same pristine image of Windows everytime you boot.
I agree. I use VirtualBox. Since Windows gathers cruft eventually, I manage different images for different tasks, cloning from a base image. And a fresh setup of Windows is FAST. I also get a good deal of support of exotic hardware through the VM so long as they are USB. But, managing VMs may be a bit much for a regular user. Most Windows users haven't even heard of the concept. Although, I do see people being happy with their Parallels on Macs. So the situation may change more as virtualization becomes more seamless and better marketed to end users.
> Bahh... I think the "vendor lock-in" for home users is a crock of shit.
The problem for home users is hardware compatibility rather than document compatibility. I actually find it simpler to use Linux on my office desktop where I don't care for any recreational hardware. I am glad wireless networking works great for you. But my card freezes my entire system. I tried both native and NDIS drivers. Good luck to any average user to watch TV on his desktop or laptop. MythTV is great once it actually gets working. Driver support for tuners is a pain and the users have to start a database server to configure it up. And what about games? While I can tell them to just go and play on a console, many fancy PC games and some games are just better on PCs (simulations, RTS. Cedega licensing works out the same or more as paying for Windows over time.
I am a geek and I don't mind investing a bit more time fighting issues. I run Linux and have Windows in a VM and dual boot as well. But I would not wish this on a regular user.
Read my post again. I am saying that Wicket has plugins (for all 3 major IDEs in fact) and that they are nowhere as integrated as ASP.NET natively is with VS. Having a plugin says nothing. A plugin may do little more than add a couple of config files and add a build task to the project. That cannot equate with polished products.
Java is now good because of Metcalfe's law. It has reached critical mass. Like you, I hated Java when it first came. It was the wrong solution for most things it was initially used for. Now things are beginning to look better. One thing that still bothers me is the mindset of the libraries and frameworks available. Many seem to fail to curb complexity. Either that or a person like me is not what they had in mind when they designed these.
It is often far simpler to use a dynamic language to cook something up very agile on the server side than resort to bloated app servers, xml hell, design pattern hell etc. Java, after 13 years still makes designing a client UI with some DB components more complicated and far less productive than it was with Delphi 1 or VB 3. And where are the third party components? I am pretty sure there are far far fewer Swing components now than Delphi with its modest user base did in 2000 (about 4000 OSS and 4000 commercial components in 2000 if I recall right).
Java will eventually get it all right but why is taking so long?
Slashdot Mirror
> I can't blame you though, there are things far more important in India that keyloggers, still saying this is not Orwellian shows a monumental ignorance about 1984 and other works of Mr Orwell.
I have read 1984 in full and regard it as one of the most important political works as well as understand its roots in real events of the last century. Not sure what one needs to do to be considered to be not "monumentally" ignorant about it by your standards.
I am not saying we have more important things to worry about. Actually, keylogger level privacy intrusion are intolerable to any democracy. What I am saying is that there is not likely a grand scheme on this. As soon as it hit the press, it will be struck down at the first legal challenge. Nor is this a national measure. It is likely something that a local police chief got ill advised through poor council (The nut in question is Vijay Mukhi - President of Foundation for Information Security and Technology). Indian public services is not technology savvy despite all the stuff you hear about e-governance (and please, don't draw comparison to trains that are late).
I think we can have the patience to at least wait and see if it actually gets implemented.
* The compiler is wickedly fast and is really good at producing compact executables.
> If it's using gcc to do the code generation, then Gnat (which also uses gcc) should do the same job. I don't know about other compilers.
I think all your other points are quite valid. Ada was always a better specified language.
GPC (GCC), Lazarus, Virtual Pascal and Delphi are different compilers. GPC may be comparable to Gnat (I only had passing experience with it). Delphi is arguably the fastest native compiler I have seen. Certainly beats the GCC implementation of Ada in that aspect. From my memory, FreePascal was faster as well. Ada does a lot more checks on the code than Pascal does and will likely be a bit slower anyway.
> 1. The standardized language was very small, so there was a tendency for it to fracture into many incompatible languages.
.NET is just that.
.NET is just as well integrated as C# and VB.NET are.
.NET. Lazarus has still ways to go but is usable now.
Small is relative. Pascal language is now Object Pascal. It is not a small language.
> 2. At that time, the implementations represented a string as a length byte followed by the string data, so you were limited to strings of length 255.
Delphi and FreePascal have PChar as well as AnsiString.
> 3. I don't think there was any (standard) way to defeat the strong typing in cases where you needed to.
Delphi and I believe FreePascal support the Variant data type (ala VB). So you do get weak typing when you need it. This is used for runtime COM and for cleanly interfacing with dynamic languages. Python for Delphi uses this with much success.
> 4. Was there garbage collection? If so, I don't recall it as being an idiomatic part of the language, except maybe for strings...? Well, most languages back then didn't have it (and gc's sucked back then, so gc languages tended to be slow), but today...
There are Pascals that target VMs (Java/.NET). In fact Delphi for
> 5. I was always annoyed by the gotchas in the syntax -- the language seemed unnecessarily picky about periods and semicolons.
I would not call it a gotcha but needs a bit of getting used to for someone from a C/C++ background. That remains.
> Has any of this changed? Has modern pascal settled on a single standardized version of the language?
Borland's implementation is still considered the standard.
> Is gc easy, idiomatic, and consistently supported in libraries and language constructs?
Delphi for
> Is there good unicode support?
I recall Delphi doing that quite well. Don't have much experience on that.
> It seems to me that today, if I wanted a typesafe language I'd use java, and if I wanted a language that compiled to native code I'd use C or OCaml.
Modern Pascal compares favorably with C++.
It's not about the language per se. FreePascal and Delphi offer great tools and libraries for certain types of tasks. OCaml is great as a language but is still considered an academic language. It does not have great tools or a comprehensive community compared to Delphi. For building native high performance GUIs with good OS integration and plenty of functionality, Delphi remains to be the most productive way to go with thousands of drag and drop widgets - both free open source as well as commercial. Currently Delphi for Win32 is the only real option to build native GUIs for Windows since MS has steered its RAD tool development towards
> Start->Programs->Accessories->Accessibility->On-Screen Keyboard
I take that back. I just put together a keylogger to test. On-Screen Keyboard does send keystroke events that can be monitored by a keylogger. It is a generic keyboard replacement after all.
How about typing the entire alphabet first and copy paste the desired ones?
Start->Programs->Accessories->Accessibility->On-Screen Keyboard
Seriously, as an Indian - this is not Orwellian as it might appear. Just a case of some bureaucratic nut who just discovered key loggers coming up with these impractical ideas.
"Never, never blame anything on a conspiracy that can be explained by incompetence."
It does not have to be about games. Compiz and Beryl have drawn enough attention. That is not necessarily a trivial market. Geeks buy the latest cards. Geeks do care about these new desktops. I did not care too much about the brand for my last card. My next video card was surely going to be NVidia just for this reason. Now that choice may change.
g ames
BTW, others have pointed that Doom and Unreal series are cross platform. These may be few by themselves. But quite a few games use these engines. If Linux 3D isn't tricky, there might be adequate market for these engine users to support Linux without too much additional trouble.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_engine#Video_
As someone who created them in native code through Delphi, I am perfectly aware of that. When over 10 years pass in IT sector, you can't get perfect comparisons. Just focus on the similarities rather than the differences please. The point being that I was naive at the time and focussed on the short term benefits of libraries, features, fast execution and familiar tools that ActiveX afforded rather than look at the bigger picture and overriding disadvantages of security compromises and lack of portability. BTW, you can get ActiveX to work in Mozilla and even on Linux but only after jumping through hoops. That is pretty much the picture today with Mono with programs authored by devs who haven't thought early about portability. MS has no business incentive to properly support Linux and other OSes. Adopting this technology will always be a risky proposition if you care about portability. I have no doubt though that it will be a more productive tool to develop in. MS tools usually are.
> Silverlight is not only the presentation forms (whichis also goos), but you can transparently use databases, manipulate and parse HTLM, wire handler events for HTML, excellent communication capabilities, and a lot more. IMO everything is more powerful/organized than the flash conteirpart.... Way to go!
That's what I thought too when ActiveX first came out. We all know where that went. If it comes down to needing those features I will take JavaFX.
> Regardless, the (grand)parent poster is an ass. Having faith in something is analogous to heroin? Please.
You can substitute cheese cake in the argument if you find heroin offensive. Although, I find using a substance that causes dependence more apt in a comparison. People find it very hard to back out of faith even when compelling reason is shown.
> Unlike a cow, an employee can tell the employer to go and take a running jump, as any sane person would.
The same argument can be used for any discrimination (race, gender, sexual orientation). After all they can all go work for someone who is OK with the stereotype. What makes you think this is more defensible than those? What reasonable arguments exist to warrant coerced surgery and invasive of privacy for management needs that can be done away with a compulsory name tag with RFID.
> Now that we'll soon see the post office being held liable for every mail bomb delivered.
> Hey, why not? It's exactly the same. They mustn't look what's inside and are liable for it.
Because it is not the same.
"The proposal does NOT entail that ISPs will be called upon to hunt down file-sharers."
They are required to look. It only says they are, if the proof (which is hard) is shown to them and they refuse to take action. A better (but silly and impractical) example is asking the postal dept to block mail sent by xyz because he/she is mass mailing copies of copyrighted material.
That's beside point of the lack of sensibility of these DMCA style takedown demands.
I followed the HelloWorld walkthrough in Europa just to check. Everything is fine here. It must be something at your end.
> Editor works, build again.
What do you mean by "build again"? In Eclipse, you don't need to do that. It auto builds in a background thread as you type.
> NullPointerException
It is usually a common beginner problem for Java as they try Hello World (including myself several years ago). It usually means that the Java classpath is not properly configured with the current folder in it. However, Eclipse takes care of that. So, can't say in your case. Consult the Eclipse channel and provide more info.
> If this is the case, how come shaolin kung-fu masters aren't winning UFC championships and such?
Ai yai yai. One of those YouTube arguments again? Shaolin Kung Fu is a "Martial" art. It was designed for the battle field (albeit in a firearm free era). There have been historical instances where the monks used their art to fight entire army (shaolin temple was destroyed when the army was not happy with the outcome of the first match and declared a rematch - without telling the monks first) and yes, pirates (despite an abundance of pirate jokes on this thread). The art itself has little to prove. However, it is not optimized for ring fighting (just like "powerful grappling" is when your opponents have spears, swords and bows) although it certainly had been used for the same. Besides, no single martial art style can win MMA style matches anymore. MMA is kind of a unique style now optimized for that rule sets.
Historically, most martial arts were meant to be used in conjunction with weapons (anything else was not practical at that time). In modern times, where the said weapons have lost relevance, we mostly use the unarmed aspects of the styles. Shaolin monks were great because these spiritual nerds trained early, trained a lot and trained to save their skin. Anyone who spends that much time in any rich martial art is bound to be awesome. The modern monks are mostly performers that the Chinese govt sanctioned after the success of the movies of the temple.
> There's no reason a clever ninja couldn't have also come up with clever techniques to beat monks as well.
Sure, Ninja's were said to kill silently - and that can be done on anyone. But one thing they never did was have challenge matches.
Is 26 GigaFlops significant anymore? I hear that the PS3 can do 20-25 from Folding@Home people. And it is only about a 5th the price. But I hear so many different numbers that I can no longer make sense of them. Why do they bother comparing with DeepBlue, an over 10 yr old super computer? Can anyone with a PS3 can report what their PS3 with Yellow Dog Linux is doing? And what are the numbers for the latest desktop processors? Any recommendations on software to benchmark in flops for my own computers?
Please don't give them any ideas.
Amusing, given that they sued companies which made software that ripped real streams back in 2000.
>> It is just wrong to expect an end user for a PVR to even know what a database is
> No offense, but that's fucking idiotic. If you're building a DIY PVR, and you decide to build it on top of Linux, it behooves you to understand the basics of system administration.
That bigotic "Those dumb users" mindset especially when basic usability testing is lacking is actually offensive. Don't know about you or what a majority of MythTV users do, but I DON'T build dedicated PVRs. I installed a PVR software on my desktop, let it run while I left for work and watched after I got back. I DO know how to administer databases. I just don't think it should come down to that for an entertainment app. Especially when that part can be automated and abstracted away.
> This includes how to run a mysql database, among other things. Or were you just expecting the system to magically auto-maintain itself?
Actually, yes. What do you think EVERY other PVR software expects you to do?
> it might be a chore for the non-technical user
> still, the average enthusiast should not find it too difficult.
It can be a chore for anybody. A non-technical should not even touch it. I have been using Linux for at least 6 years now (both desktop and servers). Not exactly a newbie. Although most of my problems were related to poor compatibility of my tuner card at the time. But I was annoyed with other aspects of the install as well. People have varying luck with MythTV. For some, it just works and they never go back.
> I think I'm just going to use CentOS or Ubuntu (the LTS edition - long-term support) and pull MythTV from one of the popular repositories.
Because many of us already tried that and couldn't get it to work. MythTV is one of the worst software I had to set up. It is just wrong to expect an end user for a PVR to even know what a database is, let alone having to set it up and deal with the error messages, even if it something popular such as MySQL. MythTV just needs to be as easy as the commercial packages to setup.
> When was the last time you looked at Swing. Swing is very good performancewise nowdays.
I didn't benchmark anything but I don't think that Swing got much better performance wise. It is the machines that have become fast enough to handle Swing. Swing in the latest JDK (1.6 update 2) still sucks on my AMD XP 2000+. But it is very acceptable on any dual core.
> What specifically is your gripe about the wicket plug in?
What gripe? I don't have any. My point is that ASP.NET is not comparable to Wicket. It's like comparing Delphi to Eclipse with a C++ plugin. Both will do the job. The development experience is nowhere similar.
1. Can you drag and drop widgets into a WYSIWYG page designer and set properties in a Wicket plugin?
2. Can you find (free or commercial) the same spectrum of third party components that will also show up in your workbench?
3. Can you visually compose compound components?
4. Does wicket support data binding like ASP.NET as well as have visual tools for the same?
> It's funny you say that. I think VMWare is probably the best way to run Windows. You can use the same pristine image of Windows everytime you boot.
I agree. I use VirtualBox. Since Windows gathers cruft eventually, I manage different images for different tasks, cloning from a base image. And a fresh setup of Windows is FAST. I also get a good deal of support of exotic hardware through the VM so long as they are USB. But, managing VMs may be a bit much for a regular user. Most Windows users haven't even heard of the concept. Although, I do see people being happy with their Parallels on Macs. So the situation may change more as virtualization becomes more seamless and better marketed to end users.
> Bahh... I think the "vendor lock-in" for home users is a crock of shit.
The problem for home users is hardware compatibility rather than document compatibility. I actually find it simpler to use Linux on my office desktop where I don't care for any recreational hardware. I am glad wireless networking works great for you. But my card freezes my entire system. I tried both native and NDIS drivers. Good luck to any average user to watch TV on his desktop or laptop. MythTV is great once it actually gets working. Driver support for tuners is a pain and the users have to start a database server to configure it up. And what about games? While I can tell them to just go and play on a console, many fancy PC games and some games are just better on PCs (simulations, RTS. Cedega licensing works out the same or more as paying for Windows over time.
I am a geek and I don't mind investing a bit more time fighting issues. I run Linux and have Windows in a VM and dual boot as well. But I would not wish this on a regular user.
Read my post again. I am saying that Wicket has plugins (for all 3 major IDEs in fact) and that they are nowhere as integrated as ASP.NET natively is with VS. Having a plugin says nothing. A plugin may do little more than add a couple of config files and add a build task to the project. That cannot equate with polished products.
Java is now good because of Metcalfe's law. It has reached critical mass. Like you, I hated Java when it first came. It was the wrong solution for most things it was initially used for. Now things are beginning to look better. One thing that still bothers me is the mindset of the libraries and frameworks available. Many seem to fail to curb complexity. Either that or a person like me is not what they had in mind when they designed these.
It is often far simpler to use a dynamic language to cook something up very agile on the server side than resort to bloated app servers, xml hell, design pattern hell etc. Java, after 13 years still makes designing a client UI with some DB components more complicated and far less productive than it was with Delphi 1 or VB 3. And where are the third party components? I am pretty sure there are far far fewer Swing components now than Delphi with its modest user base did in 2000 (about 4000 OSS and 4000 commercial components in 2000 if I recall right).
Java will eventually get it all right but why is taking so long?