Post by Shankar UnniPost by Buchhttp://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39149502,00.htm
Yawn.
The main fear is that Java technologies could be forked and the
"write > once, run anywhere" attraction to Java will be lost,
Hah!
Almost no one relies on "write once, run anywhere". There have been so
many minor but significant incompatibilities between JRE versions that
most heavyweight apps just ship their own private JRE (not installed
into the system or the registry) and force the app to run with that JRE.
Speak for yourself ;-). We have and do deploy Java applications that run on
a variety of platforms. That is one of the beauties of Java.
It is true, that you do not possess BACKWARDS compatibility, but you do have
forward capabilities. In other words, my 1.2 compiled app will run fine on
1.4, as will 1.3 compiled apps. The reverse, of course is not true. But
neither has it been of any other application programming environment that I
am aware of/
Post by Shankar UnniEven now, you can't write an applet that uses Swing and expect it to run
on most machines. And even AWT has enough quirks in it that I know of
apps written for 1.3 AWT that don't run on 1.4, because the Focus model
changed, or some quirk in container behavior changed, or something..
This is just not true. Any application that uses a compatible JVM works
across platforms, if you use the standard Swing libraries and and any other
libraries that are NOT platform specific.
There are myriads of examples. For instance, download Argo UML and run it on
Windows, Mac, and Linux. I do it everyday, as I have three desktops
running.
JBuilder itself, is a very good example of a intense Swing developed
application that works on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac. All of these
examples dispell your notion that Swing is not Xplatform compatible.
Post by Shankar UnniNot that Microsoft does it better, either - .NET is on so few boxes, and
they also have the "upgrade-itis" problem with 1.0, 1.1 and 1.1+. But
at least their download is *much* smaller than the Sun JRE.
Huh? The MS NET 1.1 runtime, is a 23 meg download, verses 14 meg for Java
1.4.2_04. Me thinks we have just discovered your bias ;-)
Net SDK 1.1 is 120 meg download verses 1.4.2_04 SDK is 42 meg in size, for
Windows. So unless you are using the new math :), Java is a much smaller
download, both for the runtime and the SDK.