Re: Microsoft Co-opts Java (Was CORBA COM...)

Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Wed, 18 Jun 1997 15:46:03 -0400 (EDT)


Yobie Benjamin writes:
> Wait before we leave this topic... Biz Section Front Page San Jose Murky
> News... M$ is releasing J/Direct which allows Java programmers to write
> directly for the Windoze platform ONLY. This is the death of write
> once/run anywhere!

Only if people get sucked into using it. Microsoft's last attempt at
sucking Java developers into using MS-proprietary interfaces (by
making it easy to write ActiveX controls in Java, a highly touted and
widely ignored feature of their J++ development environment) seems, so
far, to have been less alluring than Redmond might have wished.

I'm actually more worried about the way that their J++ compiler
generates nonportable *.class files from Java source which *doesn't*
use any MS-proprietary interfaces --- apparently, it inlines some
methods from their AWT implementation. (The interfaces of these
methods are about as platform independant as anything else concerning
AWT, but the implementations, which are what gets inlined, are of
course dependant on the platform-specific innards of their own
libraries). There's been a fair amount of recent discussion of this
on USENET.

With J/Direct (or the ActiveX stuff), you know when you are being
portable and when you aren't --- you only get the proprietary stuff
when you ask for it. With the J++ AWT bug, on the other hand, you're
screwed whether you like it or not...

rst