OF MICE AND MENUS (JAVA)
OF MICE AND MENUS (JAVA)
Sent: 6/4/96; 12:27:13 PM
From: jhendler@cs.huji.ac.il (Jim Hendler)
Dave- My friend vard@well forwarded me your comments, knowing that my research group has been fooling around with Java. Generally I think your comments are right on, and I second your guess that the whole world will move towards Java, wasting just as much time and money on a worthless gimmick as was the move from C to C++ (I won't go into a rant about c++, suffice it to say I'm not a fan). I do think, however, you miss one point that is IMHO crucial -- that's the java/netscape link. Right now, we write code in my lab on just about everymachine imaginable ranging from 68000 chips on robots to various and sundry supercomputers. C and Lisp are our languages of choice (Lisp since we're an AI lab and must talk to lots of other people's Lisp stuff). While C and commonliso give us compatibility accross platforms in general, we spend a lot of time recoding our interfaces -- X, MacApps, Windows, etc. Even under various emulations, we still have to do a lot of work. Just as a learning experience, one of my students did an interface to his C program in Java, running under Netscape. He then realized it ran on most of our main platforms (since they support netscape). Other than specialized disk I/O code (which still needs to be tailored to various OSs for efficiency) the interface code was clean and uniform -- this is a new experience for us. Previous attempts to use various compatibility packages never worked as well. One other point - we can also run this remotely across the web since netscape also gives us the ability to download the frontend stuff and network to the backend pretty nicely (again, with Java helping with the download part). While we've only just started, and our experience is anecdotal, it did open my eyes to some potential for Java. I still don't understand why it's getting as much hype as it is (that's not true, I do understand having lived through Unix' initial hype among others) but I do think that there might be a baby in this bathwater. Still, this is the new religion in town and it will take a while for people to realize that it is not something great and wonderful - but it does have a couple of good ideas, which makes it superior to Windows and Unix if nothing else... Prof. J. Hendler Univ of Maryland
Prof. James Hendler fax: +972-2-658-5439 Visiting Professor/Fulbright Fellow tel: +972-2-658-5805 Institute of Computer Science jhendler@cs.huji.ac.il Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler
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