Java Jitters:

I wanted to like Java. I really did. It sounds like a marvelous path to market access without Microsoft. Perhaps someday it will even be terrific. But not today.

I have five main objections to Java.

1. The premise is broken. "Write Once, Run Everywhere" simply doesn't work. Sun Microsystems has spent little time worrying about any non-Windows environments of Java other than the one that is important to Sun, namely, UNIX. If you write Java using a Windows system, your app almost certainly will have odd behaviors on Mac OS, and vice versa.

2. Poor performance. This was one of the first critiques of Java, and it stands. An application will run slower, perhaps markedly slower, than an app written in a conventional way.

3. Java is a mess. Java happily follows some very old-fashioned ideas about file systems. File references are all by paths, so they break easily, just like on UNIX or Windows. Worse, and unlike Windows or Mac OS, Java has no concept of resources. Consequently, Java development, distribution, and end-user application tends to have lots of cryptically-named, messy files.

4. Lousy user experience. The user expects to be able to simply double-click an application to run it. Running Java is far more complex, with runner apps, browsers, or mandatory extra files. Your app will be marked as hard-to-use even before it's launched.

5. Java is a security risk. Sun has heavily advertised that Java presents less of a security risk to users when used for delivering web pages, compared to ActiveX and other other technologies. However, it's ironic that Java also presents a huge risk to developers, since Java bytecode is decompiled much more easily than compiled code from "real" development tools. There are some kludgy workarounds that help in part, but a complete, automatic solution is nowhere in sight. Ya wanna give away your proprietary algorithms to competitors? Use Java.

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