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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Wood who wrote (20941)	6/28/1998 8:29:00 PM
From: Sid Stuart	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

*OT* The main problem is that it is a cycle hog of epic proportions and is happiest when surrounded by megabytes of free RAM. It has reached critical mass among the developer community. Although it's to early to say for sure, it seems ever more likely that the solutions it offers will propel it across the chasm from "interesting idea" to "we've got to have this" among the corporate IT manager croud. If/when that happens, the next wave of corporate upgrades will be a given. There is research/development being done in several companies to improve the performance of Java. Sun's HotSpot VM, which actively profiles programs as they execute and optimizes the sections that use the most CPU time, is an example of the results. Sun claims it is capable of executing Java programs as fast programs written in C++, so the cycle hog may turn into a cycle mouse. The speed deficiency is also only for for interpreted Java programs (most are). There are also several IDE's that generate binary applications from Java source code. These applications are said to be generally as fast as similar C++ applications. As for memory, I haven't seen much written comparing the memory usage of C++ programs vs Java, but I doubt there would be much difference. Where Java will have an impact is on the quality and quantity of applications. In Java, software developers finally have a generally available language that makes it easy to write good code. I have heard comments from mid-level development managers from IBM and Novell that say developing in Java improves the productivity of programmers by 30-40%. That improved productivity combined with the additional feature of simplified code sharability offered by Java Beans is why everyone, even Microsoft, is climbing aboard the Java train. So what impact will this have on AMAT? (Which is why you are reading this, isn't it?) If developers spend less time fighting the language they are using, they can spend more time trying to understand how to create programs that help the user instead of confusing him. Better programs means more people will be able to understand how to use computers and thus will buy them. In addition, the Java VM will start showing up in an appliance near you: phones, washers, watches, set-top boxes, oscilloscopes. All these devices will consume chips. And we all know what increased chip consumption leads to....