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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mongo Slade who wrote (9064)	4/15/1998 3:26:00 AM
From: Robert	Respond to of 64865

In reply to your questions: 1) Browsers do run on top of an operating system. However, a browser has the virtue of making information viewable despite the differences between the different undelying operating systems. This threatens MSFT's OS monopoly as any OS that can support a browser becomes equal to any other OS. Then MSFT has one of two options, to compete their OS better than any other OS to support browsers, or to change the nature of browsing from being OS independent to being OS dependent. They have opted for the latter by using their OS monopoly to distribute a browser that ties internet browsing back to the OS (ActiveX, DHTML, propriertory tags, content deals etc.) 2) Apart from cpu's that can run Java bytecode naturally, each OS will require their own java virtual machine to translate, statically compile or even dynamically compile the java instructions to the instructions of that machine. If by platform you mean OS/CPU combination, the answer is yes, a java virtual machine has to be written for each platform. Java virtual machines have the ability to commoditise the OS. 3) The proper question is not "Are Java programs really compatible?" but "Can people write compatible programs across platforms?". It is possible to write java programs that are deliberately non-portable by accessing system resources particular to a platform, or using platform specific functionality (native methods for example). It is possible to write fully portable java programs but to do so requires deliberate planning from the outset. It is much easier not to write portable java programs.