> Anyway, I know that Anders hated the complexity of JNI and was more of > the school that we should make it easy to inter-operate - a very > different attitude to Java's 'thou shall not leave this > language' (which has changed over the last years to 'though shall not > leave this JVM'). Consequently, the interoperability story .NET since > got is remarkable simple and powerful. I believe it's one of the
My understanding (reading between the lines of prior discussions) was that Microsoft needed/wanted a way to build on top of, and preserve, access to their enormous Win32 library set, which back in the mid-90s, was one of their key strengths. Not having an easy way to do that from Java and the JVM was a deal-breaker. It seems to me that Sun took a big risk by not making it easy to interoperate with the vast set of libraries, much of it written in C, that existed when Java came out. What I remember people discussing back then was, "how are they going to address the lack of libraries?", because we all believed that the only straightforward answer was to make interop with C/binary libraries easy. Perl, Python and other languages went that route. But by not doing that it forced people to write/rewrite existing libraries in Java, and for the most part, that bet paid off: we now have a great set of libraries to work with. And in the majority (almost all) of the contracts I've worked on, the teams just haven't needed to use JNI. Patrick -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
