Hi, I would like to through our multiplatform Java editor into the ring on this thread. First for a bit of history... Ephox were one of the first companies to have a commercial DHTMLEdit control-based editors back in 1999 and we were the first to port our solution to a Netscape plug-in. But pretty quickly we saw that we needed a Mac-friendly solution as well so we started a Java applet development project in late 2000. This yielded results in early 2002 when we released our Java 2-based solution.
We have invested a great deal in making a Java-based editor which is comparable to the Win32 IE solutions, and we are pretty much there now. ELJ fully support style sheets, Word importing, nested tables and all the good things you would expect from a Win32 IE-only solution. In fact, we also support WebDAV, XML tags and server-side code - something you won't get from IE out-of-the-box. We display 95% of XHTML features, and those we do not render yet we at least preserve. >From my experience Java is the best solution for Mac OS X... it comes installed natively and performs very well. Apple have invested a lot in making Java work _great_ on Mac OS X. Mozilla will be interesting, but it will require a pretty major R&D effort from someone to get it up to enterprise level and I doubt the return is really there; it will probably only be available in an entry-level editor. On Windows, Java also works great. Deployment is actually much better than an ActiveX solution - supporting side-by-side deployment, and installation and upgrading without administrator privilelges. The only difference versus an ActiveX solution is that the Java Plug-in needs to be installed (although I am watching the current Microsoft-Sun court case with interest :)) but this is a one-time only affair and rarely a problem for corporate intranets. And besides what is the difference between installing a new Java VM versus a new Visual Basic VM? (most of the ActiveX editors use VB). Of course, platforms for developing software are just that - nothing more nothing less. Whichever way a development team goes there are always pros and cons, and hardly ever a "perfect" solution. Your engineers still need to code the dialogs, build the engines and test the resulting product. I think it has been said before but "satisfying user requirements" is what matters. See "Are Rich Clients Taking Off or Tanking" for an interesting disucssion of client technologies at http://www.oreilly.com/editors/. Thanks Andrew CTO, Ephox www.ephox.com --- Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.423 / Virus Database: 238 - Release Date: 11/25/2002 -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
