Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : INPR - Inprise to Borland (BORL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Boucher who wrote (627)	7/23/1998 7:13:00 PM
From: Randy L. Carter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5102

Hi Karen, Thanks for your comments about Inprise and Java. It's great to have such a knowledgable person as you posting here. I hope that you like SI enough to eventually remove the "Trial member" tag from you name and become a regular poster. Did you recently invest in Inprise or do you just routinely monitor these threads? You mentioned, briefly, in your post that Inprise seems well positioned. Could you embellish some, perhaps in a discussion of the relative positioning of Inprise, Iona, and BEA? Also, can you comment on the industry's view of Inprise's entry into the transaction service and application server markets? I have read words such as "highly anticipated" and "exciting" used, by presumably unbiased reporters, in connection with ITS. Can you comment? Finally, Inprise's advantage seemingly is that they can fully integrate middleware with tools. Is this likely to give them much of a competitive edge if they do it successfully? TIA

To: Karen Boucher who wrote (627)	7/23/1998 8:38:00 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5102

I work for The Standish Group) recently completed the compiliation of survey data from more than 367 IS Managers and found that the use of Java has increased dramatically in the last year - it is in fact the #2 language for new application development I keep hearing that. But "show me the money". Where are the apps? Until there begin to be some finished products out there, my view is anyone using Java is tinkering to see whether it is a working language. I mean, a decent app in other languages in today's environment can be turned out in a few months. Where's the Java? I go to my local Best Buy or Compusa and I don't see any Java apps.... Some may misunderstand my take on Java, however. I have nothing against it. I just think it is a new, unproven (and, at this time, still largely unusable) technology. Some here have, a year or more ago, declared Java the god of languages. My point has consistently been that, from the perspective of one who was in the software business before it was cool, it takes time for these changes to occur. It takes time for languages to mature. And it takes even more time for old languages to be supplanted by the new (I'm sure your study, reflecting 1960's COBOL as the third most heavily used language, could be cited as support for this position). With the current battle raging over whether MSFT will co-opt Java as its own, it is far too early for Java to be considered for most significant projects. A year or two from now, this may have changed; but responsible software developers are moving slowly in this respect. Most interesting to me is the idea that respondents in your survey would report that Java is in heavy usage -- making it the #2 language! Unquestionably, there is Java development going on, but I doubt it is anywhere near the scale of what is being done in that relic COBOL. It almost seems like maybe your respondents were "responding" to the hype....

To: Karen Boucher who wrote (627)	7/24/1998 1:35:00 AM
From: Kashish King	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5102

Although there are still some rather out of touch individuals who don't understand this, the vast majority of software is not found shrink-wrapped and sitting on the shelves of retail stores. I have to say that every month for the past two years the shelves of bookstores have been expanding to hold Java titles from Beans to JNI to Security and more. Java is now the largest single segment under lanugages. This demand is being fueled by commercial use of the technology for distributed access across heterogeneous environments. Comparing the barf-bag mixture of add-on solutions which have been adopted by most Windows development environments to Java's clean and elegant mechanisms for reuse, persistence, security, reliability, distribution, component construction, potability and development environment integration is like comparing roadkill to filet mignon. Visual Basic, Power Builder and Delphi are rarely used to develop retail applications, I think Java will break that mold and take hold in both home-retail and commercial environments.