From: arne@vajhoej.dk
On 10/13/2025 9:52 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article ,
> John Dallman wrote:
>> In article <10cdflq$5c0$2@reader2.panix.com>,
>> cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) wrote:
>>> I think also the focus shifted dramatically once Java came onto
>>> the scene; Sun seemed to move away from its traditional computer
>>> business in order to focus more full on java and its ecosystem.
>>
>> They tried that on us, but were deeply unconvincing.
>>
>> They were expecting us to be impressed that they'd done JNI wrappers of
>> about ten functions from our 500+ function API. We said "Presumably you
>> have tools to generate this stuff automatically?" and they didn't
>> understand what we were talking about.
>
> I never quite got the business play behind Java from Sun's
> perspective. It seemed to explode in popularity overnight, but
> they never quite figured out how to monetize it; I remember
> hearing from some Sun folks that they wanted to set standards
> and be at the center of the ecosystem, but were content to let
> other players actually build the production infrastructure.
Sun did not have any success making money of Java.
But they made so much money of their server business that they
apparently thought they could spend some money on Java. Until
a decade later when their server market dried up - Java
development was in slow motion from around 2006 until
Oracle restarted it.
Sun did build J2EE/JavaEE app servers. One miserable failure
after another. IBM, BEA and the other made the money from
that market. And in all due respect they also did a lot of the
work. For one of the early releases of J2EE (1.2 or 1.3) it is said
that IBM did 80% of the spec work.
> I
> thought Microsoft really ran circles around them with Java on
> the client side, and on the server side, it made less sense. A
> bytecode language makes some sense in a fractured and extremely
> heterogenious client environment; less so in more controlled
> server environments. I'll grant that the _language_ was better
> than many of the alternatives, but the JRE felt like more of an
> impediment for where Java ultimately landed.
Java on desktop never took off. AWT, Swing, SWT, JavaFX none
of them. Bad timing. The world was switching to web UI's and
there were many well established technologies in the market:
VB6, Delphi, MSVC++ with MFC etc..
(Java applets had a good run in browsers, because they could
a lot of interesting stuff, but that stopped when it became
clear that those capabilities was leading to hundreds of
security vulnerabilities)
(and Java GUI is probably the worlds most used GUI today
in Android phones, but that is a different thing)
In some ways JIT compilation lend itself better to server
side than client side. The relative startup overhead is huge for
a client app being used 5 minutes. But not a problem for a server
app running for a month between restarts.
Also note that WORA do make some sense for servers especially
for less prioritized OS. I am not so sure that we would have
ActiveMQ and Tomcat on VMS if it was not because they just
run as is.
But bytecode and JIT is a lot more than just WORA. It provides
really rich meta data that can be used with annotations and
reflection. There is a reason why Microsoft for WinRT decided
to use .NET meta data format even though it is a native
COM based technology. It also makes optimization of dynamic
generated code easy - just generate the byte code, load it,
run it and the JIT compiler takes care of it similar to
any other code.
For those that want the native code then there are
options today. Oracle Java 9-16 did support AOT compilation.
AOT was then moved to the GraalVM product.
(And now there are talk about moving it back into OpenJDK)
Arne
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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