According to this editorial, Java is pretty much useless:
Java Developers Journal
sys-con.com
"Should you use Java everywhere? Almost without a doubt, no. There are
things Java is good at and things Java is not good at. There are also
practical considerations, such as corporate infrastructure, that have
nothing to do with Java's capabilities but impact where Java is and is
not practical.
As an example of what's not practical, look at Corel's attempt to
re-create its office suite in Java. In theory, Java is as suited for
this as any language, more so than some with strong multitasking. But
this was not the right place for Java. For one thing, you need every
ounce of speed on a machine to make these overprogrammed suites
perform well. JIT compilers notwithstanding, native code is still
faster right now.
Even worse, you know someone would get the bright idea to host this in
a browser. Why buy a thousand copies when you can access a single
copy over the LAN? It'd be a toss-up as to who would shoot that guy
first -- the network administrators who were dealing with network
overload or the users who were waiting hours for their new, "improved"
software to load.
Probably the biggest lesson that needs to be learned is that Java is
part of an architecture, not an architecture unto itself. I hear
companies saying, "We've got to go to Java," and I can understand
their frustration and desire. The Internet has turned the safe, known
world of client/server on its ear, and the closest thing to a standard
that most of us can find is Java.
That's great. I'm all for Java being the language of the Net. It's
compact, it's elegant and it's fun to program in. The problem is that
you can't simply swap Java for whatever language you've been doing
two-tier development in and expect to have a solution. For one thing,
JDBC is still not as far along as ODBC or native drivers. For another,
it's harder to provide the same rich GUI, at least on Windows
platforms. Love it or hate it, Windows is still the overwhelming
desktop today, and we need to be able to build better-looking Java
apps if Java is to become a dominant force on those desktops. Some of
this is due to the browsers, rather than to the language itself. I
have to applaud the people who put HTML together as a document language, but as an application environment it leaves a lot to be
desired.
So what do we do? It's really pretty simple. We need to put Java where
it belongs. It's not the only tool we have, and we must have good
reasons for selecting it over other languages and products. At the
same time, we need to push for improvements in the browsers and
compilers, and hope that a JavaOS will actually make sense, both from
a programmatic sense and, in an era of $700 PCs, an economic sense.
Meanwhile, I need to call Joe and tell him he was right. I hope he
doesn't rub it in."
-----------------------
The browser was designed only as a hypertext viewer. It was
never meant to be an applications platform. Applets inside a browser
is a ugly hack.
Where does Java belong?
In a church. |
