On Mar 31, 2005, at 1:33 AM, Tracy R Reed wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Andrew P. Lentvorski, Jr. wrote:
OpenOffice 2.0 has Java dependent components. This has provoked a huge
flamefest.
Where? I have seen several people refer to this flamefest but no linkage
to the actual flamage. Is this on some blog or OO.o mailing list or
something? I'm not a fan on java on several levels so I do hope someone
sees fit to rewrite the functionality so it does not depend on java.
Newsforge article: http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/03/22/204244
There is also whingeing on Slashdot, but I just ignore that nowadays.
List of features requiring Java:
* Base, the new Access-like database application
* The media player, which adds movie and sound clips to documents
* Mail merges to e-mail, which also require Java Mail
* All document wizards in WriterBasically my read from the included quotes is simply that the OpenOffice folks are getting very limited help from the open-source community at large and chose the solution that was easiest to integrate. The best code is code that doesn't get written; the second best code is code that you didn't have to write. In addition, OpenOffice is targeted directly at enterprise users; many of them have Java resources in house.
And, I'll repeat it again--tell the gcj developers to get off their asses and this whole "Java isn't free" becomes moot.
Personally, I wish people *would* switch from C/C++ to Java for application programming. Java has its problems, but I would never go back to C for applications programming. I would rather use C++, but very few people seem to know how to use C++ correctly (use the STL, dammit). Python requires non-standard extensions for OS threads (it has other faults, too). Perl has too many idioms and weak support for programming-in-the-large abstractions. Everything else is too small to consider for deployment to large chunks of programmers.
To throw in my experience, the only language which gets even *remotely* close to being cross platform portable from a multimedia standpoint is Java. There is a reason why everybody uses Macromedia Director to ship multimedia apps on the web; all the other solutions suck (including Java, but Java is least bad)
I just wish the Java Multimedia Framework would actually become a base part of the distribution. Without JMF, there is just no hope for Java video (audio is okay--amazingly there are pure Java OGG Vorbis decoders).
-a
-- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
