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

To: Maher Sid-Ahmed who wrote (1139)	9/7/1998 9:48:00 PM
From: Mark Bracey	Respond to of 5102

From the INPR user groups: There's an interesting article in PC Week about the shape of Java. Read it at: zdnet.com What's interesting here is that Sun are essentially conceding the desktop to Windows, and concentrating on Java for server-side technologies and embedded systems. The Delphi tie-in is of course the recent demo of a Delphi bytecode compiler which only produces server-side code - no UI stuff at all. One inevitably wonders whether this is an indication of Inprise knowing something we didn't about Java's future, or simply a coincidence caused by an early demo of an as yet fledgeling technology. IMHO, this announcement makes reasonably good sense for Sun. Java's UI has been a much bigger bone of contention than its performance, and is one of the worst sources of bugs on different platforms. Applet compatibility with browsers has also been problematic, with all manner of nasties appearing in Netscape and IE that prompted Sun to release their own plug-in VM. Java has however remained notably unpopular with web-users despite this, and will likely be largely displaced as an interactive web medium by XML, which looks set to become the hot web technology in 1999. MS are of course probably doing a little dance of glee at hearing this, as their Windows hegemony is safe for the time being. Again, a cynic might wonder whether some of Sun's new stance is the result of their awareness of how weak their court case against MS actually is, and this same cynic may also wonder what sort of future VJ++ has now that their primary reason for releasing a non-pure Wintel Java has more or less disappeared. Much will probably depend on how well developers react to it when it finally appears: if it sells in large numbers, they'll probably keep it around for a while at least; if on the other hand the market treats it with relative apathy, it'll probably go the same way as Visual Pascal. The announcement is also good news for Inprise, whose JBuilder-2 is already one of the most server-oriented Java tools out there, and who have some of the best Java/IIOP bindings available in their VisiGenic CORBA ORB. Add in Delphi server-side bytecode capbilities (which will probably debut in D5), and you have a company which is well positioned strategically to take advantage of corporate shops who may find Java more interesting