Java 1.3

[Andrei Moutchkine]

	IMHO, FreeBSD lag is not enough of a reason to support 1.1. I use
FreeBSD at home myself and it pains me deeply that there is no Java 2
environment for my OS, hurting its adaptation as a server platform, but
this has nothing to do with E development group, who are under no
obligation to help much larger and better established FreeBSD development
group. Right now, if you are looking for a server platform with x86
price/performance and want to run Java, you are stuck with Linux, as
simple as that. I am OK with that, knowing that Linux users are a lot
easier to migrate to BSD than Microsoft users. I don't think that Linux,
with a possible exception of Debian, is an appropriate platform to run a
production server on (flame away), but it might just be THE Java
development platform right now, because its got IBM behind it. IBM has
demonstrated time and again that their Java offerings kick the crap out of
Sun's own (Jalapeno > Hotspot, jikes > javac, TSpaces > Javaspaces, etc.)
It is also not entirely true that 1.2 doesn't run on FreeBSD. I heard it
runs quite well under Linux emulation, albeit with a performance loss. You
can start out using emulation for now and join the massive lobbying
efforts to get Sun and/or IBM to support BSD (just take a look at Javasoft
and IBM Alphaworks pages. Non-support of FreeBSD is reported as
a bug with by far the largest number of developer votes to fix it ASAP. So
far, Sun is ignoring their most showstopping bug, but once that new
contraption of a MacOS (partly based on FreeBSD as far as I know) is
supported, adding FreeBSD support should be trivial. I think the
non-support of a traditional Mac OS is even more of a non-issue that
Windows support. Who do you expect to find on Mac OS apart from DTP and
art people? If there are indeed security-minded developers on the Mac,
somebody like Metrowerks is going to pick up the Mac port (They've not
known to pass up something for nothing) Are you trying to be "write once,
run everywhere" like Java? This is Sun's fight and not yours and more
propaganda than reality anyway.
	I also do care to speak up for 1.2 (aka Java 2). The whole 
"Java 2" naming convention mess is there to show just how major the step
between 1.1 and 1.2. I think everybody is migrating to 1.2 (or already
did) and it has a major staying power. You get the new collections, Swing
is included and is in its (hopefully) final resting place in javax... and
so on. On the other hand, what does 1.3 really offer over 1.2? I am pretty
unclear on that. Personally, I only bumped into one place where 1.3 code
was different than 1.2. Some obscure Swing bug caused Sun to change the
attributes of a table cell renderer or something like that. I guess most
Swing code is spit out of some GUI builder that does the right thing based
on your Java version, so nobody is even going to find out. This tells me
a lot less people will bother upgrading 1.2 to 1.3 right away than people
moving from 1.1 to 1.2. If you can only support two versions, I'd go with
1.2 and 1.3. 1.1 is a lot less pleasant, screw it.
	A real reason to support 1.1 would be browsers, not FreeBSD I
think. Most browsers out there can handle 1.1, but not 1.2 and its gonna
stay that way for a while I guess. Do you want ELib to be used in applets
or not? It's not as useful as it sounds, because an applet's networking
rights are severely crippled for security reasons. You need to have the
full support of Sun and/or Mozilla project behind you to do anything about
it, most probably.

On Fri, 2 Jun 2000, Mark S. Miller wrote:

> At 11:56 PM 6/1/00 , Paul Snively wrote:
> >That's fair. What installed base there is of MacOS is < X; I don't know what
> >the adoption rate will be; MRJ 2.2 runs on a variety of platforms that can't
> >run MacOS X; I like < X better than X (at least, so far)...
> 
> At 05:51 AM 5/24/00 , Ben Laurie wrote:
> >Mind you, neither 1.2 nor 1.3 run on FreeBSD right now, so they're both
> >a dead loss from my POV!
> 
> I yield.  For now, E will continue to support 1.1.x.
> 
> Anyone care to speak up for 1.2.x?  If not, then once we shift from Cryptix 
> 3.1.1 to Cryptix JCE, the next release will support 1.1.x and >= 1.3.x, but 
> not 1.2.x.
> 
> 
>          Cheers,
>          --MarkM
>