> i posted a nice little "talk" about this earlier.. got flamed..
> now it is proven that it is so unstable.. not yet ready for any
> serious development.
I wish I had been around for this, I was unsubscribed briefly and missed
the talk and the flame.
> i would love to see a FULL (not just a few classes) implementation
> on the palm.. so my PC programs work on the Palm.
>
> what about LayoutManagers etc? have they support for these
> yet? lightweight components? JDBC classes?? (for talking
> to .PDB files).
There's no doubt that this stuff is pre-release, and even pre-usable ... I
spoke with some of the KVM people at JavaOne, and specifically asked them
about form-type stuff; noone wanted to say anything specific, not even
"they're in the works."
Unfortunately, it seems like a useless environment without these types of
things. There's a reason why (give or take the scrollable text field) all
the demo classes they've given out have been Pong or Tetris -- there's no
support for doing anything else yet.
There are two solutions to this, as I see it: lightweight or heavyweight
components. I stand ready to be proven wrong, but I don't see that
lightweight components will be workable on the KVM platforms. The KVM on
the Palm can hardly keep up with moving a Pong paddle around; I really
can't believe that it'll be fast enough to draw forms by hand.
Heavyweight components might work (especially on the Palm, where the Palm
OS has proven quite capable of providing quick and thorough forms). If they
go this route, though, they'll restrict it to some native common
denominator, and since I don't think Motorola pagers implements buttons,
lists, etc., I doubt this is likely to happen. It would mean the loss of
KVM platform independence; this is a big selling point for Sun, although
I'd appreciate even a Palm-specific Java class library, as long as it
looked much like the other Java libraries.
One other thought: if Palm is pressing the "Palm Computing Platform" for
adoption on multiple devices (e.g., Qualcomm, various 'smart phones', this
new Handspring venture), why not a KVM that supports all PCP devices?
These are just my idle thoughts ... I'd love to see it work, but I was
really disappointed by the KVM stuff I saw.
Regards,
Ben Flaumenhaft
