Re: Jeppesen database

[Bob Deep <bobd@cssgroup.com>]

Keith Brown wrote:
> 
> >How many people are interested in using Java?  We opted for it because it
> >pretty much eliminated our dependence on a particular platform (as long as
> 
> >the platform supports Java, of course).  Certainly PERL is portable as well
> 
> >but IMHO it is not well suited to large scale development.  C is not quite
> 
> >as portable.
> 
> Not to start a religious or flame war, but I've tried several large applications
> written in Java, and I'm sorry, I won't do it anymore. They're slower than molasses
> in the winter on my P200 (which used to be fast), and even with my 64MB of RAM
> (which used to be a lot), they take all of that and want more. On both Windows
> and Linux.
> 
> C/C++ is almost as portable. As long as you decouple the GUI from the core functionality
> and don't use any OS specific file handling or other system calls, it isn't
> all *that* hard. Sure, it's more work, but I think it's worth it on all other
> levels. Besides, there are more and more good cross-platform GUI kits that make
> that easier to do now (open source, too). If you start out designing the program
> to be portable, it will stay that way.
> 
> Of course, I've never worked on a large cross-platform project, so take what
> I say with a grain of salt :-).

You got it right... Java is a slow mamath that can bring the best
machine to a crawl, but it's portable.  I would not want to write some
heavy hitting image processing code in java.

However, for user interfaces there is nothing like it for portabliity
and usually you don't need to be too speedy with a UI.

Despite the speed and resource problems, I think Java is worth it for
portability unless you are really running in very limited situations or
where you are doing a lot of processing on data.. (So don't write your
flight simulator in Java, unless you have one heck of a machine.)  I
think the speed and resource useage problems will be worked on over time
and the problems that cannot be solved will be less and less of a
problem as hardware capibilities grow... (Shucks, I remember when a 386
DX 25 was a really fast machine that ran circles arround some mainframes
of it's day... It is only a matter of time before Java's resource useage
becomes a non-issue.)

We've seen this resource issue with other languages, C, C++ for example
Where resource hogs in their eairly days and assembly was the way to
write small and fast programs.. Now days, C is considered a very
efficient way of writing code...  Java in time will be too.  It just may
be awhile before you write kernel code in Java...  

That's my thoughts...
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