Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

["James P. White" <jim@pagesmiths.com>]

Bertrand Meyer wrote:
> 
> In my message on the "second historic mistake" I had
> written that, whereas Eiffel has successful commercial
> applications approaching the million lines of source
> code, there was no comparable experience in Java outside
> of applets and of the Java tools themselves.
> 
> A few weeks ago there was an interesting exchange:
> 
>         [Ken Garlington]
> 
>         !!! The discussion is interesting in that Meyer
>         !!! (a) criticizes Java for not being used on large
>         !!! projects (whatever happened to unfair criticism
>         !!! of new languages?
> 
>         [Robert Dewar]
> 
>         > > Hmmm! I guess he does not consider the Corel office
>         > > suite large. Or perhaps simply does not know about it.
> 
>         [Bertrand Meyer]
> 
>         > It would be difficult not to know about it,
>         > as it gets hammered over and again by Java proponents
>         > (along with Java tools themselves) as the example of
>         > completed Java development, to the extent that one
>         > may wonder whether there is any other.
> 
> It's really fascinating to read this again a month later,
> with the recent announcements -- widely reported by the
> press -- that Corel is dropping its Java strategy altogether.
> 
> So much for the showcase success of the century...

As I am sure you will hear, those reports were entirely inaccurate.

What Corel dropped was the already doomed, regardless of language of
development, approach of creating monolithic personal computer product
suites for the consumer marketplace.

In its place is a true network centric architecture in which servers
provide the high volume memory and cpu cycles.  This is an inevitable
consequence of the economics of computing which is now playing out as
the cost of communications decreases.  Corel, along with most other
players in the industry, are and will be using Java to implement that.

As for the size of the products developed with Java so far I am sure the
experience of my company is not unique in having built a working system
of over 500K lines in less than 12 months (and it will be growing into a
system of millions of lines over the next two years).  This involved
combining large modules (50K to 200K lines each) which successfully
integrated with no serious failures even though the respective modules
are all rather immature and barely out of beta (and sometimes not even
that).

Even though Java lacks anything as comprehensive as DBC, in our
experience the simple matter of having automatic memory management and
pointer protection has yielded a productivity boost of several hundred
percent.

jim
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James P. White                        Netscape DevEdge Champion for IFC
Director of Technology Adventure Online Gaming http://www.gameworld.com
Developers of Gameworld -- Live Action Role-Playing and Strategic Games
jim@pagesmiths.com        Pagesmiths' home is http://www.pagesmiths.com