>>> What do they mean by "scalable," with Java?
Unfortunately, this is a buzzword now, and you have to know who's talking. Generally speaking, though, Java scaling is good, in theory, because you can launch threads that can be taken up by multiple processors or use the networking features to write programs that work on LANs or the Internet in a parallel way.
In theory, you can write a program, say to filter gigabytes a day of astronomical radio source data, that could run on a laptop, workstation, super-parallel box, or on a bunch of volunteer machines on the Internet. (This would of course, take some doing. It's not automatic.)
The program would not care if it was on a Mac or a mainframe. That's scalable as well as portable. In most other languages multithreading is more of an afterthought at the compiler level, except for a few like Occam (which is processor dependent on Inmos parallel boxes.).
However, there can be problems with garbage collection schemes in shared memory, I guess, but I think they are solvable, if that is what they are talking about. Also, there is really no boundary here keeping them from eventually adding c++ style rules for automatic variables to java, with scoping, or other techniques, since the programmer doesn't really do much about memory now.
Chaz |
