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Strategies & Market Trends : A.I.M Users Group Bulletin Board -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: OldAIMGuy who wrote (5261)	8/5/1998 5:06:00 PM
From: Jack Park	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18928

Hi Tom A Java Overview for investors :-) There are so many Java startups it makes your head swim. Most of them, however, are building applications using Java. Why should that be so? Turns out that Java attempts to create a programming environment (much like Basic, C, Pascal, and so forth) where you can create programs to run on various computers. What sets Java (and Forth) apart from the rest is that it is interpreted, not compiled. The code you write in Java is, as they say, compiled. But, it is not compiled down to machine readable code (making it run on only one kind of computer, e.g. wintel). Rather, your Java code is compiled down into what they call Bytecodes. These are just tokens that get interpreted by program called a JVM (Java Virtual Machine). The JVM is available on all major platforms, so bytecodes are theoretically useable on all those platforms. Nice idea. Problem is that good ol MS decided they didn't like some of the stuff in Java and substituted their own stuff. So, now we have balkanized Java -- there's the 100% pure Java (which I write), and there is MS Java. That they can continue to call it Java is subject to a court battle. So, if I transliterate all my C++ code originally written on my Mac to Java, now, you can run it on both the Mac and Wintel (W95 and above, not on the old 16-bit windows platforms). Add to that Unix, Linux, and (I've heard) AS400 if you're of the behemoth persuasion. Downside: JVMs on different platforms make things look funky if the program was written elsewhere. For example, the wintel folks expect to see the Cancel button on the right. It's not on the right for the Mac folks. So, Sun came up with a look&feel system that lets you select (either at program time or at run time) what your program will look like. I don't know if it's strong enough to rearrange buttons, though. It is that argument that causes MS to boast that compile once run anywhere is a falsehood. 'nough politics. Some folks think that Java, being an interpretive program, runs too slowly to be useful. Not true. Yep, it's slower that it needs to be and they now have compilers that make it run faster. I have a Java system that lets me either compile bytecodes, or compile native code. That makes it totally competitive, but now, I must make a Wintel version and a Mac version. That's still OK because I don't need to rewrite the source code, just select the compiler to use. More later if desired. Jack