Mood:
chattyNow Playing: Clicking Cookies - Clueless generation gets caught with hand in some kind of jar (nerd "humor")
Topic: Off the Wall Speculation
To those agonizing over how a tiny company like VCSY can appear out of nowhere with technology that appears to supplant technologies over a decade old. I offer this discussion over the importance of Java and Javascript. See Java Smackdown below.
I tend to agree with the nerd in this discussion as I have dug through the history of Java as a smartcard effort in the mid 90''s and the ultimate use of VCSY Emily (VCSY's XML based scripting language) to build the Apollo/Transtar smartcardsystem using the latest generation smartcard technology of Jerome Svigals.
I believe an indepth analysis of events and efforts over the past 20 years would yield a not-so-pretty picture of Java in the hands of elitists attempting to kill off the advent of scripters such as resulted in Javascript adherents.
With that "compiled code is superior to script" elitism, as with all technolgical elitism, came a huge crippling of effective software development and use. Sun's Java press hit the wall some four or five years ago when their combined effort with IBM to build a complex telephony system in Germany failed to scale. That sobering event lead to a slow death of Java that continues today.
You might examine some of the things I've pointed out on this blog and elsewhere about SavaJe, a telephony effort that mysteriously vanished in 2006 only to be scooped up by Sun shortly before VCSY sued Microsoft in April 2007.
Please reference this timeline.
I commend your perusal of this timeline so you can get a stratified view of events over the span of the past few years. It can be enlightening once fleshed out with your own examples of "hey, I know an interesting coincidence". It's a great game to play with those who work in the industry. They have their own time points and event correlations that build a picture of desperate efforts and questionable strategies.
Anywho, here's the discussion for your own internal discussions. Do with it what you will.
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/one_time_only_javascript_java.php
One time only: Java-Javascript smackdown
James Fallows// The Atlantic
13 Sep 2008 11:00 pm
James Fallows writes: Blah, blah, blah, dit da dit da dit, yada yada yada...
And then he offers two views of correspondents. First the Java proponent as pointed to by the James Fallows article above:
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/about_chrome_next_in_the_serie.php
Ken Broomfield writes:
There's plenty of irony in Google's effort to create a robust client-side platform for web-based ("cloud") applications, mainly because Netscape and Sun tried and failed to do exactly this over ten years ago. Part of this effort was led by a guy named Eric Schmidt, then at Sun, and used Java, a technology that's superior to the Javascript language that's now being used largely because Java never quite worked on the client (i.e., in the user's browser).
So, Google's effort to create a good Javascript environment in Chrome -- which is now sorely needed -- should have been unnecessary, and sophisticated web applications should have appeared a long time ago. Multiple efforts to create client-side web application platforms are now under way, with Balkanizing effect: Google with Chrome (Bosnia), Adobe with Flash/Flex/AIR (Croatia), and Microsoft with Silverlight (Serbia) [Microsoft had to be Serbia :)]. That all these platforms are inferior to what ought to have been achieved years ago with Java is a tragedy....
Little stuff:
-- On additional tabs using more and more memory, this is true in Firefox and IE, but iRider has sophisticated memory management to limit memory usage even with hundreds of pages open. Free memory is utilized to speed access to open pages, but released as other apps need it. (Everyone misses this, but it took a lot of effort.)
-- Firefox, IE and iRider can leak memory, though Firefox is notoriously worse than the others here. (Opera, another browser the press now ignores, does a great job in this department.) But often what seem to be leaks can also be mere memory fragmentation, as when a room seems full but is actually just cluttered. It's not clear that Chrome solves the fragmentation problem, which is trickier. (The paged virtual memory environment in modern OSes mitigates some of the problems of fragmentation, but also makes it trickier to solve completely.).
-- Entering search queries in the Address Bar has been possible in IE since version 5 and iRider from the start. And in iRider, to quickly run multiple searches, say "Palin moose", "Palin bridge to nowhere" and "Palin Alaska secession", hit Shift-Enter after each.
The good news is that Chrome will be open source and may be very useful to us and others.
------------ separator between correspondent views ------------
And here, an anonymous nerd writes:
My correspondent writes:
... I am a nerd. As such, I'm afraid I have to dispute a bit of what your friend Ken Broomfield, the founder of iRider (which I've downloaded and am evaluating now), wrote to you about the early days of web application development.
From a developer's perspective, Java was far too complicated and the performance of the Java Virtual Machine far too poor to be useful for web applications in the early days of the internet.
Broomfield refers to Java as a "technology that's superior to the Javascript language" and suggests that JavaScript "should have been unnecessary, and sophisticated web applications should have appeared a long time ago," but that's false. As programming (or scripting) languages go, JavaScript has always been relatively easy to learn and has allowed developers (and businesses) to rapidly develop useful web applications.
The same is not true of the strict and complex Java programming language. Good Java programmers were (and still are) few and expensive; good web technology (JavaScript/CSS/HTML) developers were (and still are) abundant and less expensive and, again, the performance of JVMs in web browsers was crap until recently.
Web application development has evolved along with PC hardware and available consumer bandwidth. YouTube was not possible 10 years ago; it is now thanks to Flash, faster machines and the fact that a great many people have broadband internet connections. Flash, not Java. Java is still far too complex, and Java developers far too expensive, for client-side web development. Java is, more often than not, not the right tool for client-side web application development. It is a "superior" technology in the same way that a jackhammer is superior to an ordinary hammer for driving a nail into a wall.
Additionally, the "Balkanizing effect" that Broomfield sees in the current competition between "inferior" client-side web technologies offered by Adobe, Microsoft and web browser developers (Google did not invent JavaScript; they have, however, developed Gears and their own JavaScript interpreter to improve JS performance and to mimic some of the functionality offered by desktop applications) is merely healthy competition between companies that would like to sell software tools (in the case of Adobe and Microsoft) or advertising (in the case of Google). He seems to suggest that Sun's Java should have been accepted as the standard years ago and that Sun should be rewarded, in one way or another, for enabling the rest of us to develop "sophisticated" web applications now and forever.
Java failed as a client-side web application technology for good reasons and web applications are evolving at a reasonable and steady rate. Like many nerds, I am excited by the possibilities presented by the current crop of web (and mobile; the line is getting blurry) technologies and am thankful that I don't have to spend my days coding in Java.
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There is much that may be discussed and one day all of it will spill out, but, for now, remember this: Not everything you know is real. Not every thing that's real you know. I know it's a basic observation but sometimes you have to be dragged back to a basic to make sense of the world around you.
Oh, and one more thing, I commend this article offered by James Fallows to your reading so you can get an overview of Chrome. You'll need one to make sense out of what will happen over the next few years.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/090808-google-chrome-under-the-hood.html
We are in the beginnings of the first public views of a disruption wave moving through the software industry. If you keep yourself educated (and it doesn't take any more effort than reading and learning by accident) you will be more equipped to profit from the disruption far more effectively than your more ignorant brethren and sisterns.
