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To: B Kelly who wrote (5424)11/10/1997 10:52:00 PM
From: Jon Tara  Respond to of 64865
 
Though the report does echo my sentiments, I still have to play devil's (angels's) advocate here, since I *do* own SUNW...

Who commissioned the report? And who did they contact within organizations using Java?

It would be interesting to know the answers to those two questions.

I ask the second question because the Java developers I am in contact with are still quite evangelical and haven't wavered yet from the party line. I think they are being unrealistic, but still the enthusiasm is still there, and I doubt they'd have answserd a survey in this manner.



To: B Kelly who wrote (5424)11/10/1997 11:17:00 PM
From: uu  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 64865
 
B. Kelly:

One of the most interesting comments I read from this article:

''I don't think Java is going anywhere, therefore I'm not going to use it if I can help it. Some Unix and Macintosh versions work unstably on Netscape versions. MS version is very stable when it works. Makes me not want to develop Java -- it doesn't make sense to develop something you can't be sure will work reliably.'' -- Frank Dziuba, president, Silicon Beach Communications

Frank Dziuba and I used to work together about 5 years ago (91-93) for a company in Santa Barbara, CA before we departed and went our own ways. I have great respect for Frank, have not talked to him for over 4 years, but one thing I can say with confident (and Frank if you are out there reading this please do say so if I am wrong): Frank is a Microsoft Windows (desktop client only) hard core developer.

The article is alledeged to have done a random sampling of 115 developers who have come across Java in one form or another, and of these it is claimed that 67% of them do not have a good impression of Java!! Well, having been a developer for over 15 years and having gone through several technological changes I know that it is usually very difficult for developers (old timers) to change their way of doing things! In otherwords once a developer comes to learn something and bases his professional work on that, it is very difficult for that developer to change! This is to say that, regardless of how much the new technology will benefit the developer's work because of the mental and psychological pattern they have developed with what they have already learned and know, they (the old time developer) will do everything poissible to avoid learning, accepting and using the new technology and will do everything in their power to either ignore it or to get around it! This has been the case from the beginning (from the mainframe to minicomputers to PCs and now to NCs and thin client machines). When it comes to software engineering this is natural and any software engineer who says otherwise simply does not want to accept the fact!

However as majority of developers have learned and those who have not will soon find out is that his time around things are different! What developers want or do not want is absolutely irrlevant!! It does not matter what technology the development manager likes or the software engineer really wants to use, the business well being of the firm these people work for requires them to use Java, therefore their preference is ridiculous and irrlevant! The fact is Java has opened a new broader market for software makers and the business people (not the developers!) that own these business entities are simply too greedy to ignore the huge revenue that the new market will generate for them. Therefore, developers whether they like it or not, will be required (and perhaps even forced) to use the Java technology and make it work whatever it takes to achieve the firm's ultimate goal of making more money!! Therefore, in my opinion, the article posted at biz.yahoo.com is nothing but pure nonesense!!

Regards,

Addi Jamshidi



To: B Kelly who wrote (5424)11/11/1997 12:52:00 AM
From: gordon  Respond to of 64865
 
Check here: zdnet.com

Those are from real world and are doing real java projects, what did they feel about java current status?

>Mark Kerbel, president of Screaming Solutions Ventures Inc., in Toronto, said he has a lot of confidence developing in Java for both Solaris and Windows NT, and has also done some work for IBM's
AIX. "There's definitely a level playing field,'' said Kerbel. "We feel very comfortable developing applications on one server that can be thrown onto another.''

>Simon Arnison, chief technology officer at Innotech Multimedia Corp.,
in Toronto:
"It's been our experience, in having developed with 100% Pure Java,
that the vast majority of implementations of the Java machine on the vast majority of platforms have been good," Arnison said. That wasn't the case one year ago, when he experienced everything from memory and
date class errors to I/O errors and segmentation violations.

"We no longer write any of our products in native code; we've bet the
farm on Java," he said.

Cheers
Gordon Shen



To: B Kelly who wrote (5424)11/11/1997 7:59:00 AM
From: Stewart Whitman  Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 64865
 
> Anyone seen the following article?

This whole article sounds like Microsoft disinformation. I think, at best, they've taken facts and twisted them dramatically. The research company lists Microsoft as a client on their Web sight mdcresearch.com so I'm more than a little suspect.

There's the question of the survey methodology. If they asked a developer "What's wrong with Java?", I'm sure even the Java evangelist could give you their laundry list of problems. The statistics at the end of the article try to give some level credability but it's really just deception unless more information informat is revealed about the survey.

There's so much bias in the presentation. For example, the title "Two-Thirds of Java Developers Losing Faith in 'Write Once, Run
Anywhere'" implies that there's been a change in developer attitude. But they didn't really have any impartial way of evaluating whether there has actually been any change (e.g. sampling before and later). "Only 22 percent of developers surveyed indicated that they were very satisfied with Java as a cross-platform development language". In my experience, getting 22% of all developers to be very satisfied with anything would be a major accomplishment.

For what it's worth, this article implies a very different outlook for Java from that of most developer's that I've talked to. For the short term, Java has some problems (mainly due to the immaturity of the language), but in the longer term it should be a winner. The question of outlook is really not addressed quantitatively in the article, and that is the really key question.

Stew