> Java's portability seems to me to be oversold; at any rate, as a USER > of apps, I hate apps written in Java. At worst, it's a pain to get > them working because the environment isn't as standard as it should > be. At best, they always seem to be ugly as sin, because Java isn't > successful in papering over the differences in appearance across > multiple platforms. Everything put out by software companies is oversold, but that doesn't make the actual product bad. You can't ask a product to live up to its sales and marketing hype. What you can do is compare it to competing technologies. Java is plainly much better for portable software than C, C++, or anything Microsoftish (Mono et al might change this). This is so true that is has completely changed the way enterprise developers work. It is now standard practice to develop enterprise Java applications on Windows and deploy them on UNIX servers. I don't know of any enterprise Java developers that develop using desktop UNIX, a terminal emulator, or a Windows-based X server. I definitely agree with you that many Java desktop GUI apps are ugly, but there are just as many ugly QT, GTK+, Motif, and TCL/TK desktop GUI apps that have a totally different look and feel as the rest of the KDE, GNOME, Windows, etc. desktop. Partly because of this problem, IBM wrote their own GUI toolkit (SWT) and wrote it in a way to make use of the native GUI tookit. The advantage is that it looks and feels more like the native platform. The disadvantage is that it supports only a subset of the platforms that Swing does. I should point out also that JDK 1.4.2 has a GTK+ look-and-feel to make Java apps that fit in well with GNOME, however I have not seen it in action. There are some quite wonderful Java GUI apps. Have you used Eclipse (SWT) or JBuilder (Swing)? > As a developer, I don't like Java because it seems to me to hit a low > point in the tradeoff curve between interpreted and compiled languages > (rigid like compiled, yet slow) and between high-level and low-level > languages (OK, so it has garbage collection, but I still have to > interact with far too many objects to do even the simplest things). It's hard to interpret this opinion. What are you comparing Java too? What is your language/platform of choice? What type of software do you develop? Mike _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list