At first I have to say it is nice to see that I'm not alone in the java desert.

Some hours ago I get definitely tired about the horribly install orgy of different java- (runtime? developer? or whateverisneeded?) kits. Imagin the situation where you need to install different java applications in the trust they run comfortably with the mysterious "JAVA" installed on my machine... Fortunetly a wide range of such jdk's sdk's and so on are available for any platform. Therefore I thougt: nice! - but seconds later in the depth of my mind I asked myself: why the hell?..

The story of failing java begun as I decided to use a IDE to develope software in C/C++ so my eyes browesed the net and googl'ed out "eclipse" a nice thing -- but it needs java. In order to install I downloaded the thing, got it installed and *bummer*: a window popped up and talked to me:"There is no java runtime environment installed on your system". ok, I installed the recommended SUN-Java-kit, managed to find out the stupid needness of different pathes to find it's classes..(totally nonconform UNIX pathes are needed but anyway I gave them all..) then the gui came up after about 20(!) seconds, prints out an "Exception"-message and sticked uneraseable on the screen. Meanwhile I looked to the consumption of resources and saw that the java-VM takes about the half of my memory of 1GB.. is that nice? after 1hour of trials (I can say that I'm an expert with 7years of UNIX-expirience) I decided to mail to a user who works with this eclipse-software without such problems. He said, I should use another jdk and so I installed the same java-kit-version from IBM instead of Sun. And what a wonder the application runs out of the box, of course very slow! With the simplemindness of portability of java I tried the same applikation to install on a sgi-maschine where only the java-kit from sun is available. As expected the eclipse-software could not run there, is that nice? so I looked around for another IDE, found a native SGI-tool named "jessie", available on Irix and Linux - exactly what I wont. As you expect, another version of java-VM is needed for it.. it comes from blackdown.org (maby blackout?).. in fact, that is the only java-kit which keeps that jessie running under linux, all others I tried (I thought the IBM-java-kit or the three others from Sun, which I already installed runs with it) failed completly. jessie reacts so slow that it was unusable, consumes 800MB Ram.. also the editor wont start -> "Eception in ...XXX" application freezes completely. But if I would like to use jessie on SGI-machine I have to use the Sun-java-kit.. and what you expect: jessie cannot run under IRIX "cannot map libXXX.so.." o.k., I found out that jessie comes with a library which is compiled for a linux system and therefor cannot run under IRIX (portability??, shit!). In order to run jessie I have to recompile - BUT: "javac is not installed" was the thing I saw wenn I did a simple "make" as suggested in the Install.txt" file to compile the fuck** library. Now I know I installed the wrong java-kit. I need the developer-kit, not the runtime-kit, that means that I have to download 340MB additionaly.. *grrr*
So now I have 4 different java-kits on my linux-box installed each is good for exactly one application, whereby I have to provide a wide range of jre- and jdk-kits which fullfills the dependencies of other applications. Each of them floods your harddrive with tons of megabytes of files which will 90% never be used, the only come to torture the user and the story goes on! every year a new kind of java-kit comes out from different places, really nice story 8-(.
Also at the FAQ at SGI for jessie I read "We decided to take java for the gui, no performance decreasing we saw in comparison to Motif-gui": *LOL* Who ever tried to work (as usual in the UNIX world) over remote display, one will see the whole desaster of java based gui-apps. Waiting for reaction to a mouse click is totaly tiring, a menu pops ap within a day but do not expact earlier. Many other depressing things of expirience with different java-gui applications leed to the personal conclusion:
Java is the totaly breakdown in software developement, the idea of highly portable and easy to program code is manque competely. The hype of Java is totaly incomprehensive, I can now really say: I hate it!

cheers

r_n_p
(rien ne va plus)

Hi,

i had no problems what so ever using Eclipse under Windows NT. I downloaded Eclipse.zip and the current Java JRE from sun (very easy to find ).
It took me about 60 seconds to install the Java VM (I just clicked 'OK' in the InstallShield wizzard everytime) and eclipse run right out of the box. It uses max. 90MB of memory and runs fast as hell. It is far superiour to VisualStudio (in my oppinion) and i use it every day since 2 months...
I also installed it under QNX (a realtime OS) on another machine and it runs very well. Therefore I can#t se why it shouldn't be portable?
Cheers

sparty2

I constantly here people share their experiences with portability, not just in programming, but all several topics of information systems. Regarding java, what i hear is some people reporting failure and some people reporting success and some people reporting both. What does this say? It says java's portability is weak. You dont hear problems with C++ do you? If someone were to say "I blame my instability/glitches on C++", the programming community would tell them to LEARN HOW TO WRITE GOOD CODE! or to go away and try drag & drop programming in Microsoft's world. Anyways, the point is: too many people experience failure with java and it does NOT make up for the success that some have with it.

- Andrew -