forgive me for musing. this is not intended as any sort of flame for anyone.
Sun is of course intent upon having their own Solaris operating system be the
ultimate environment upon which to run the Java2 platform. for a JVM to work
optimally it has to be woven deeply into the native code operating system under
it, and nobody knows an operating system better than those who built it. we
should not be all that surprised if MS creates a snappier JVM on Win32 than Sun,
or that IBM creates the snappiest on OS2 or AS400. Solaris is one of the most
capable and scalable OSses in existence, and Sun wants to sell big iron and
Solaris to people running serious Java server software. makes good sense.
GNU/Linux, the rising hype star, enters on the scene as "newcomer" (after
ages of gestation in the alternative universe where people do things for fun
and respect instead of money), and naturally must be considered a contender for
future systems of all kinds. Sun therefore needs to help bring the Linux JVM
into existence for Linux, just as it was forced to build the whole JDK on Win32
as well. presumably they'd abandon Win32 development if they could avoid it,
but naturally they cannot (though maybe now, with IBM's impressive new
offering....), and the same goes for any other competitor.
now Linux is of course in so many more ways a cousin to Solaris than Win32 is,
so Sun should necessarily be happy with its growing popularity. people growing
up on Linux will be vastly more capable of administering and using Solaris
than the click-addicted backslashers from the FAT partition (pretty dang
poetic, eh?), so Sun will naturally welcome any transition on that front.
on the other hand, there's this issue of their understandable desire to have
people run Solaris servers, hopefully on nice meaty Sun boxes. it would be a
shame if Linux did indeed achieve world domination on the server front, unless
of course the SPARC port somehow reinforced the utility of Sun big iron.
many (including myself, wholeheartedly, and i would argue, justifiably) are
hooked on Java these days, especially in the realm of server software, so we
choose our server boxes based at least partially on how well they can run Java.
those of us on the "low end" working on non-huge server systems are sort of
torn. crashy opaque NT systems run Java extremely well, while our lean
stable transparent Linux boxes run Java well, but not extremely so.
correct me if i'm wrong, but i can't help but conclude that it's in Sun's best
interest to have Java run extremely well on Solaris and on any other operating
system that represents the _client_ side of the story (ie. unable to
effectively invade server space, like NT), prioritized according to market
presence. however, it is not in Sun's best interest to have Java perform
better on Linux servers than on comparable Solaris servers. as Linux grows in
client popularity, however, Sun's interest in having it run Java well will grow
accordingly. as long as it can be tamed.
--
Gerald de Jong, Beautiful Code B.V.
Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Tel. +31655893940
http://www.beautifulcode.nl
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