Re: Java momentum slowing ?

[bob@nospam]

In article <CrmZ2.2549$2j3.4026@clnws01.we.mediaone.net>,
pmartin@mail.earthlink.net says...

>
>Thanks for the information.
>
>Most of the links you refer to are listed as "unstable", "usable" or
>"in development": too bad.. In addition, none of these bindings is part of
>the Ada standard: there is simply _no_ Ada standard here, while Java does
>have a standard (albeit quite unstable: AWT, then SWING, then what else ?).
>

I have no idea what you mean but 'quite unstable' in the above.

Pepole are writing now very advanced GUI's in Java, more advanced
in some cases than what you get with your platform specific, cryptic,
tie me down to one platform forever, MFC and VB type of applications.
 
And you are confusing things. SWING use AWT for the native components,
but swing introduces many light-weight components that are written all
in java, with no native counterpart to them. think of it as Swing 
adding more things on top of AWT, The Java AWT and SWING API's are fixed 
and people are using them all the time and are well documented.

And I expect in Next JDK release to see more GUI stuff added.

There is nothing new here, people want to improve things, and new technologies
will show up building on what was done before. If you call this unstability,
then I am not sure what you are doing in the software business, this sort
of thing happens all the time. A technology that does not change with
time, and continue to evolve to meet the changing needs that arise, 
will soon die.

>BTW, Java is not a scripting language: you need to use a compiler. Maybe
>you confused with javascript ?
>

Yes, he must have been, alot of people confuse the 2 things.

>The main points I wanted to make is that the argument "the language X is
>more portable than Y" is invalid without a distinction between language
>and environment, and that people are comparing the Ada language with another
>language + environment: apple with orange. 

But you are missing something. The whole point of having a standard library
that comes with the language, is to be the interface between the application
written in the language and the environemnt.

For example, in Ada, you use the Ada IO package to open a file in the 
'environemnt'.

in Java, you use the Java IO package to open the same file.

no difference. 

Each library for different platforms is implemented for that specific
platform, sheilding the application from the environment changes.

The difference is that in Java, the shield is much more advanced.

The Java standard packages are more rich and exhtensive and are
growing all the time, while the Ada ones are small, limited, and frozen.

For example, Sun is adding a new package to manage XML documents using
the SAX 1.0 API specs and DOM specs for XML data object mapping, this means,
I can unpack my JDK tar file, and find in it all the packages I need
to work with XML documents, in addition to everything else allready there. 

Check the Java Collection framework in JDK 2.0, an STL type collection
of usefull classes that many people are starting to use productively.

The Ada library has no such thing. So, when I program in Java, I am 
much more efficient and productive than in Ada, not becuase the Java 
language is better (although the Java language is very good also), but 
becuase the Java library is much more advanced.

regards,
Bob