Re: [Clockwork-developers] Java, anyone?

[Joel L. <jo...@lo...>]

+- On Thursday (1/2/2003 9:20) Shawn McMahon <smc...@ei...> Wrote-
| I don't like the idea of packaging a JRE, they're huge, but if you don't
| you find that Java is not write-once run-anywhere, not even nearly so.

You're correct that we shouldn't expect to compile some Java bytecode
and let it loose on every platform, expecting it to work with whatever
JRE is installed there.

What I'm referring to, though, is the way that using Java would free the
programmer from needing to think much about the platform while writing the
code. It would be really nice not to have to look up every function to
make sure that POSIX guarantees it's there. And since we said we want to
support Windows (in some capacity), it would be _really_ nice not to have
to wrap code in "#ifdef WINDOWS". And it's just nicer to be able to open
a socket connection in 2 lines instead of 20.

| However, with the GNU Compiler, we could produce compiled native Java
| applications, on every target platform.  This would actually be easier
| than finding a JRE for all the target platforms and keeping it
| synchronized when we need new features.

If this works, it sounds great. I'd rather deliver native code for each
platform anyway, especially since using Berkeley DB would require that.

| I vote for whatever language you and Brian are best at coding.

Good point. I was working on the assumption (based on responses to emails
on this list and previous information I was told) that both Brian and
Shawn D. don't have very much free time to contribute, so I'd be doing the
vast majority of the coding. While I'm better at C than Java, I'd rather
not do a project this large in C because I think I'd spend too much time
coding things that are already there for you in Java and debugging memory
leaks. And I just plain don't like C++.

Brian and Shawn D. can correct me if I'm wrong about their planned involvement
in coding.

-- 
Joel