> So when you bring a PC world concept (JAVA) into the MF world there is going to be a LOT of hostility between the two. What really scares me is that JAVA was probably rewritten for the MF without the years and years of experienced IBM design philosophy and debugging. Now we are JUST starting to see the dragon without its clothes on. >
Don't forget that Sun designed and developed Java, being written in C which is now pretty much cross-platform as far as I know. I didn't know Java until fairly recently, but I would expect that it was first developed on Unix, and although I don't like Unix after the mainframe, it is a very mature and popular operating system, whereas the PC is often viewed as being a bit of a joke within the mainframe world (been there, seen it, got the teeshirt and I worked in PC support) . IBM must conform to the Sun specification or it would not be able to offer true portability. There are extensive and demanding tests to ensure that the IBM version conforms, and this subject is taken very seriously within IBM as Java underpins a very large number of products and is key to enabling customers to mix-and-match platforms. As for the criticism "JAVA was probably rewritten for the MF without the years and years of experienced IBM design philosophy and debugging", I am in a privileged position where I can see the amount of work that has been invested in its design over many years, I can assure you that your assertion is untrue. If you were allowed to visit the lab and see for yourself, you might change your mind. One of the big problems was that the Java design required it to support "lazy" programming whereby the programmer did not have to clean up dynamically-allocated data areas (thus avoiding user storage creep - see I am using the "right" terminology now). This resulted in the need for a large pool of storage (the JVM heap) and very complex and sophisticated code to do what the programmers should have been doing (Garbage Collection). The OO design also costs due to its complexity versus more traditional languages. The totally portable byte code (Sun design) was initially interpreted and was too slow, so various techniques were used to compile the byte code into machine code, resulting in the JIT which compiles on the fly; again complex and needing storage for compilation and storing the compiled results. All software products in this category need yet more storage to function, I worked in CICS a few years back and I know that it is the case, it has to manage the environment and this costs. I could hark back to my System/360 with 64K of memory and Assembler - we managed to get applications to work with real memory, none of this Virtual Storage nonsense etc. etc. etc. Technology moves on, and the extra sophistication costs, but we now have the hardware and OS to match the demands. No language is perfect, but Java provides a write-once-run-anywhere facility that would have been undreamed of back in the early days. I even had to convert COBOL to run on different platforms, never mind all the other myriad languages that were available somewhere but not everywhere. I have a feeling that there are possibly a large number that I am never going to convince, but I can't just sit back and ignore assertions like the above that are made due to lack of knowledge. Probably going to get a load of flack about this, but I will never be Politically Correct, I tend to speak my mind. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mike Poil Java z/OS Level 3 Service IBM United Kingdom Limited, Hursley Park, Winchester SO21 2JN Internal: 246824 External: +44 (0)1962 816824 Java debugging: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/diagnosis/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
