[geeks] Go Apple....

[David Cantrell]

On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 12:17:00AM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   Well, let's put it this way.  If they do it right, you'll be able to
> run it on anything that supports a JVM.

Assuming you have exactly the right version of the JVM, that all the tiny
little bits that make it up are in exactly the right place, and so on.  I
have never had much luck with getting Java to work except on OS X - and
that's only because OS X is sufficiently young that there's only the one
version of Java available yet and that is bundled with the OS.

>                                          That *is* one of Java's
> strong points.  If a super-fast-on-slow-hardware application is the
> goal, Java is the wrong tool for the job.  But if the emphasis is on
> extremely rapid application development (and I mean *extremely*
> rapid!), cross-platform capability, or ease of implementation, Java is
> definitely the right thing.

I agree.  My main beef with this port is that porting from C/C++ to Java
is nothing like an easy task.  I don't expect to see any usable results
from this, and think they'd be better off bundling an X server with the
application, in a nice Mac point-n-click-n-drool-friendly way.  XDarwin
already exists and has friendly licensing terms.  Bury it somewhere in the
.app directory that makes a Mac desktop application and the punters need
never worry about it.

Porting an enormous existing code base is NOT the same as making use of
Java's cross-platform wonderfulness.  Remember Corel's Java office suite.

-- 
David Cantrell    |    Reprobate    |    http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ``I know, I'll use
  regular expressions.'' Now they have two problems.        -- jwz