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To: ild who wrote (43675)	12/31/2005 12:13:26 AM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Things like Java applets are only in Java because you can't write them in anything else. Doesn't that give them a niche ?

To: ild who wrote (43675)	12/31/2005 1:54:19 AM
From: regli	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116555

>Many people have always considered Java to be the new COBOL. Nobody uses it unless they're forced to by a non-technical customer.< This is an utterly silly comment and IMO doesn't deserve the professional label. (I am not attacking you, ild). Java is object based and runs in its own virtual machine. It therefore is extremely portable and not reliant on operating systems and integrated application/language frameworks that become obsolete within short order, often 3 to 4 years. When significant development effort is expended, the idea is to have code (objects) survive for the long haul and not die because an application framework has gone through another iteration. The advantage to Java is that there are more and more objects available as the developer community tackles many more problems. It is the availability of a broad range of objects as well as their reusability once developed in combination with the portability of the framework that makes Java such an excellent proposition. I wonder which fly by night technology this "expert" advocates. If purely development speed were the issue then why aren't we still seeing a lot of code in ADF, Focus, DBase, etc. They died because the code was too closely tied to the framework. However, if you wrote a C++ object oriented system (without multiple inheritance) in 1985 and converted to Java with little effort, any code not related to user interface technology or external interfaces would be perfectly current today. Java will be around for a long time and will be easily ported to the next operating system ("Winux" anybody?). .NET will make it at the very most for another 10 years even in Microsoft environments. I contend that it will not be ported to any foreign operating system once .NET dies at Microsoft. How many ports of COM have we seen outside MS and who is using it? It is very important to understand that Java is a language as well as an environment. If a system is implemented correctly then a Java based system will require NO code changes on the server side (and in many instances even on the client side) when taken from Windows to Linux or for that matter even to a z/OS system. Now this is flexibility as a business could decide to shift an application from a Windows server to a license free Linux box with basically no effort! I could address his COBOL comment as well but his comment simply doesn't deserve a more in-depth exploration.