Hello. My name is Ryan Sutter and I just subscribed to the list. I am a Java developer working in Minneapolis, MN. I used to be fairly heavily involved in the Java Lobby (if you were at last years JavaOne and stopped by the booth we may have talked) but I've been too busy with other things this year to devote my time to activism the way I would like to. Kinda bites. Anyhow, I just kinda wanted to introduce myself to the list. Also, I would like to say thanks to the guys working on the Java-Linux port. Frankly, it rocks. I am working on a team that is developing a 1.1+Swing application for a target audience that is 80% Macintosh and 20% PC. Being a consultant, I took the machine given me (a Pentium/Win95 system) and started developing with it. After getting extremely frustrated at Windows lack of stability and the time and work it was costing me I decided to switch over to Linux. I have had a lot of Unix experience and even worked with Linux a lot but I had never done Java development on Linux before. I was afraid that I would encounter "write once, debug everywhere". I am happy to say, I never missed a beat. I use the Java-Linux port, TYA and Jikes along with emacs+JDE and have yet to encounter any problems at all. The app runs great on Linux, and Windows and (thanks to the dramatic improvements in Apple's MRJ in the last couple months) on Mac as well as also running pretty darn well on Irix and Solaris. This is a fairly large application that takes advantage of a lot of advanced Swing functionality and so far Java-Linux has a been a joy to work with. In fact, my overall Linux experience (and Java on Linux in particular) has been so good that two other developers on the team are scrapping Windows in favor of Linux for their Java development. So, thanks for the great work. Anybody who says Java is dead is a friggin' idiot. Once you've been on a development team with 7 developers who use 5 different development environments, 4 different OS's, one set of source code and one executable I can't imagine you could ever want to go back or that you could question whether or not Java works. You couldn't pay me enough to go back to an IDE, OS, version control system and target platform all dictated to me by one company. What a joke that is. Java is for real, Java on Linux is awesome and I'll shut up now. Later... Ryan Sutter
