Re: Java momentum slowing ?

[pmartin@mail.earthlink.net (Pascal F. Martin)]

In article <7h55i0$2ro3@drn.newsguy.com>,
	bob@nospam writes:
> I have no idea what you mean but 'quite unstable' in the above.

I have a colleague who have had trouble with different versions of Java:
he worked first with one that did had SWING (Java 1.2, I think), then tried
one another which did not (Java 1.1), to find himself forced to upgrade
with a beta product (now released version) which was still Java 1.1, but
has a slightly modified SWING, because of the 1.1 AWT. All that in a short
amount of time.

This is almost as complex as identifying which subset of Ada95 has been
implemented by each Ada vendor :-).

> tie me down to one platform forever, MFC and VB type of applications.

I hate window: I have no problem bashing these. However we tried 3 Java
environments, with each enough performance problems we decided Java is not
ready yet for our core application (redraw of the SWING table widget is
enlightening).

To be honest, we are still excited about Java; it gives us the one feature
we really want: we can load dialogs dynamically. Because our application
contains many dialogs, and we have to be able to adapt or add dialogs for
each customer, this is a real advantage. We also can upgrade live, which
is also important because our application is kind of 24/7.

> And you are confusing things. SWING use AWT for the native components,

I know that. It is just that when you buy a product, you have to be careful
(see above). This is probably the least portable aspect of Java.

> 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.

.. and Ada has no GUI interface defined for it. Everyone comes with his
own proposal: Tk, GTK, motif or win32 bindings, etc.. all differents, with
little hope of mixing them in the same program (= integration nightmare).
I like the freedom that comes with all these different interfaces, but at
some point, one need to settle for a common one.

Let be serious: there will never be any standard to cover all environments.
However, I don't know that many commercial project on Windows or UNIX
that has no GUI. It is now the standard user interface, period. I hope GTK
will fill the need (I use Gnome at home, you see.. :).

> while the Ada ones are small, limited, and frozen.

The Ada communauty seems to have difficulties to define new standards:
the world around changes fast (GUIs, CGI, XML,..), and the Ada speachs
seem to have been written 5 years ago. Even the printers we buy today
have a WEB interface ! I am sure this is possible with Ada; I am also
sure this is more expensive, only because you have to redo it.


As a personnal conclusion, I have used C and Ada intensively; I start
looking at Java. So far, the most portable programs I have seen was well
designed C programs. Ada programs may be difficult to port when bindings
are used: implicit assumptions on C definitions, availability of all
bindings on each target, etc.. Portability is hard work, not a given.

This will close my contribution to this thread. Thank you for listening.

-- 

Pascal F. Martin.