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

To: Lee Nelson who wrote (10969)	8/28/1998 8:01:00 AM
From: Mike Milde	Respond to of 64865

<< When you write your networked apps, how do you distribute? Do have to do JIT or java runtime installs on each architecture? Are you dealing with an in house thing where you have total control over the environment, or is this app being used by customers in the field? >> Either way, it just depends on what you are trying to accomplish. If your code needs to run on only a few machines, then by all means, install Sun's JRE on that machine (or some other runtime). I have also worked on a project that was distributed to lots of customers, and the JRE was shipped right along with the code, just as you would do any other software package. Writing applets and letting customers use a web browser is a possibility if you want a completely "no install" experience for the customer. You run into all sorts of problems though. 1) Microsoft's Internet Explorer implementation of Java left us pulling our hair out. You can write Java code for IE 4 that will crash the whole machine and cause it to need rebooting. 2) Only the 4.0 browsers support the JDK 1.1. 3) You probably want JFC and JDK 1.2 for a really nice application. You can't run that in the browser at all without some kind of plug-in. The bottom line is really this: - Write a Java app and ship a JRE with it for your heavy duty applications and in house software. - Consider applets for light weight user interfaces that communicate back to a server. Try and keep them simple and off-load as much work as possible to the server where you have more control over the environment. Netscape 4 will allow you to do RMI and CORBA from an applet. IE 4 won't do either (Microsoft never implements anything that makes it easy to communicate to a UNIX host. :-) You can download all the CORBA libraries as part of the applet. We did that for one application. It does work, but it makes for a very heavy client and you are more likely to run into browser bugs. Mike