On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 11:08:53AM -0600, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Thursday 17 February 2005 10:43 am, Jeremy Turner wrote:
Java had the first crack at being platform independent. It got a reputation at being very slow in the beginning, and many people still repeat that.
Java is a virtual operating system that can be installed on top of other operating systems. As an OS, it's somewhat limited and specialized, but that's what the "Virtual Machine" in java is all about.
I wouldn't call Java an operating system, in the typical sense of the word. It doesn't get to directly access hardware. It's a user-space application. It's more of a translator: it translates the Java bytecode into machine-level commands. It does take care of garbage collection unlike C or C++, but like an operating system.
I wouldn't argue that Java is an operating system, but it is another layer for applications to go through. It all depends on your defination of "operating system" though.
Java applications don't run on Windows or Linux, they run on Java, which runs on Windows or Linux.
Much like Perl scripts run on Perl, or Python scripts run on Python, yes.
Personally, I object to having to install an operating system on my operating system in order to see the animated dingbats on somebody's web site.
I agree. A lot of Java applets I see are basically worthless. Frontpage used to make Java roll-over buttons. There are plenty of other technologies that can use that same look today without the need for Java.
Give me something like HTML that "runs" natively on multiple platforms, that doesn't require me to download and install a support system.
But basically a web browser _is_ a support system. It processes the HTML and displays it, just like the Java VM would do. The processed code on the server end (Perl or PHP or whatever) will still require interpreting, just like Java. And while HTML is portable across platforms, it is incredibly difficult to maintain a consistant look using HTML with CSS2 with multiple web browsers (read IE vs anything else).
Jeremy