Java being superceded

Talliesin

If the thread concerns Java, then discussion on applets IS relevant as far as I'm concerned.

It's a valid part of the discussion, but you are giving it far more importance than it deserves. Maybe a couple of years ago this amount of importance could be applied to applets. Not nowadays.

I'm a web developer, and the only way I've ever used Java thus far is naturally in an applet embedded in a web page, so I stand over my words.

How is that natural?

Applets aren't the only way a web developer can use Java. In the vast majority of cases it's the last way a web developer would want to use java. There are very few applets worth their salt. There are lots of java applications, ActiveX controls (I'm thinking primarily for server side use) etc. of use in web development.

Bard

Originally posted by Talliesin:


How is that natural?

Applets aren't the only way a web developer can use Java. In the vast majority of cases it's the last way a web developer would want to use java. There are very few applets worth their salt. There are lots of java applications, ActiveX controls (I'm thinking primarily for server side use) etc. of use in web development.

Let me clarify - as a web developer, my first introduction to Java was through applets which needed client side support to run correctly, and were, in general, slow and clunky and not worth the wait. This put me off Java a bit, naturally enough, and I haven't (unfortunately, I guess) since had the opportunity or the inclination to explore Java further.

I'm only speaking, as I only can, from my own limited experience. And, X_OR - I never claimed to be an expert in Java OR it's use in web development.

---

Excelsior

this is a dinger of a conversation.

keep on you titans of wit!

Greenbean

Java can be very usefull for making something extremely portable except for the whole commerical bs that surrounds it. This is me coming from a programming background - not a webdev one.

During the summer I did a project where by someone could make a webpage, include my applet and they would essentially have computer-architecture/operating-system independent interface to a remote mp3-encoder. The cool thing was the applet was only there to serve the code from your computer and receive it back again (java/sockets essentially gaining me the independence). The encoder was on a fast computer and done in c/c++.

I spend two weeks working my way around not buying £300 software authentication certificates just to let me write to the local harddrive and connect to a server which the applet wasn't downloaded from. Netscape kindly provided their security classes in source code - microsoft wouldn't; hence it works in netscape and not in IExplorer.

My conclusion was - java would be great if only it wasn't victim to power struggles. Its got really good file/network code (12 lines of c network code turns into 3 in java), its got a good set of standard classes. The main reason to use Java is for its OO ideals and independence. In that respect we find microsoft doesn't support java properly and messes it around. In the end, for a programmer its a sh;t start to any project to know that you're gonna run into tons of problems before you get going - so thats why I'm using c++ for my current project.

Derek Bell

Originally posted by Otak:
Yes. I'm not a porgrammer but it's being suggested that XML will supercede Java, or (more specifically) a collection of XMl stylesheets (when they're developed)

XML is a markup language - it's for defining other markup languages, like HTML, so I very much doubt that XML will replace Java.

Derek Bell

Originally posted by Bard:
If the thread concerns Java, then discussion on applets IS relevant as far as I'm concerned. I'm a web developer, and the only way I've ever used Java thus far is naturally in an applet embedded in a web page, so I stand over my words.

Java applications run independently of browsers, which is my main interest. I'm writing the front end of a project that uses Java for the GUI. The parts that really need high speed are written in C and C++ and linked to the Java executable via Java Native Interface (JNI).

The C++ code is also legacy code from a previous project, which is another reason for using JNI.

The GUI seems fast enough on my work machine:
650Mhz 256Meg RAM, running NT4.0

Derek Bell

Originally posted by Baz_:
What I heard is that one of the guys in my college was told by one of his lecturers that java is on the way out and is about to be superceded, has anyone else heard this, and if so what is it being superceded by???

I'd be a bit more skeptical until I got details - rumours are going around the place all the time.

If it concerns C#, I wouldn't be too certain - Microsoft tried with ActiveX, but Java was too well entrenched for it to have much of an
impact.

Bard

Originally posted by Derek Bell:
XML is a markup language - it's for defining other markup languages, like HTML, so I very much doubt that XML will replace Java.

Obviously XML is a different technology to Java. It won't replace it but it's certainly going to be in massive use over the coming months and years. Microsoft themselves literally said at their Enterprise 2000 Launch that they're 'betting the shop on XML'.

Nice one.

---

Hobbes

I find Java in windows is kack, although it is no were as clunky as everyone makes it out to be.

On the mac it works like a dream and linux not too bad either.

As for what it's used for? A lot of web server developers I know prefer writing servlets to using MS based coding.

Derek Bell

Originally posted by Bard:
Obviously XML is a different technology to Java. It won't replace it but it's certainly going to be in massive use over the coming months and years. Microsoft themselves literally said at their Enterprise 2000 Launch that they're 'betting the shop on XML'.

Nice one.

Larry Wall (AKA "Mr. Perl") is working on XML projects for Perl, IIRC. Looks like it's going to be big - the latest edition of O'Reillys' Nutshell book on HTML is about HTML and XHTML