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It runs everywhere!It runs everywhere!Posted Aug 21, 2012 15:44 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: It runs everywhere! by fb Parent article: Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar
Sun missed the boat with regard to tooling: back in the early days of Java, had Sun made javac just that little bit more powerful, it could have solved many of the build solution needs there and then. Instead, people probably used Makefiles for a while before Apache Ant came along.
And the best retort to "install a JRE" is, of course, "which one?" I have to run stuff which only works with Sun's Java - it can't be anything like IcedTea that most probably implements the breadth of the required functionality - and so the practice of industry hacks targeting a single, narrow, effectively proprietary platform continues, but everyone can claim that they're using open standards.
Oh, and those industry hacks will all be working in a cathedral-style project up to their necks in dodgy code and with "security through obscurity" being one of the project value statements.
But I agree with you that high-level languages with managed environments can and should provide significant simplification over systems programming languages like C and C++. The emergence of stuff like Maven indicates that there's plenty of complexity remaining, however.
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It runs everywhere! Posted Aug 21, 2012 16:16 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
> And the best retort to "install a JRE" is, of course, "which one?"
And the best retort to it is, of course, "the most recent one". Sun JVM is very backwards-compatible.
It runs everywhere! Posted Aug 21, 2012 16:39 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Sun JVM is no more; Oracle JVM comes with a very annoying binary license:Unless enforcement is prohibited by applicable law, you may not modify, decompile, or reverse engineer Software.Remember where we are writing: we may be forgiven for disliking these restrictions. Besides, Oracle only distributes JVMs for a very limited set of 8 operating system and processor architecture combinations: Linux x86, Linux x64, Mac OS X, Solaris x86, Solaris SPARC, Solaris x64, Windows x86, Windows x64. Considering that ARM systems probably outnumber all these combined, it is a great limitation. In all this discussion I haven't even brought out the most annoying point of Java development: its "native" graphical toolkits AWT and Swing, which are not integrated with any environments and look alien everywhere. Luckily there is SWT, but it does not precisely simplify the configuration management problem.
It runs everywhere! Posted Aug 21, 2012 22:52 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Just use OpenJDK. It's fully functional for 99% of applications.
It runs everywhere! Posted Aug 22, 2012 9:21 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Or fully function for 99% _of_ an application. Like Wine. :)
It runs everywhere! Posted Aug 22, 2012 14:54 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Actually, I was impressed with Wine running a fairly old, but still 3D-based, game that I thought would be a migration show-stopper recently. Even the fancy joystick controller worked as intended.
Meanwhile, with Java runtime environments, if you don't want to run the Sun JRE or just can't, even if OpenJDK should do the job because of its common heritage and proximity to the Sun JRE, that's no guarantee it will work. As I noted, people in certain industries are great at touting the supposed openness of a technology while deploying something that only works with one vendor's specific product.
It also doesn't inspire confidence that Oracle as a vendor, ignoring the reputation currently enjoyed by the company after its recent behaviour, still lives on pre-Internet time with respect to security updates. That said, I do wonder how much attention any of the JREs get in comparison to widely-used open source projects.
It runs everywhere! Posted Aug 22, 2012 15:07 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Unlike with most Java programs, which are only tested on the Sun^WOracle JRE, at least there is a large community of users who try out Windows programs on Wine, and file bugs/send patches to get things fixed. :)
It runs everywhere! Posted Aug 22, 2012 1:07 UTC (Wed) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]
FWIW, Sun/Oracle JVM is available on ARM (and PowerPC), but it's only free for trial use:
<http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/embedded/downloads...>
I've had a lot better luck with those than I have with the various IcedTea incantations on ARM/Linux.
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