Re: Netscape the Big Win

[cman@communities.com (Douglas Barnes)]

Tim --

HotJava is a web browser that happens to be written in a language
called Java, that runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine, which
is part of what gives this combination of tools the high degree of
platform independence we've been talking about. JVM is the thing
that is currently being ported to different platforms both by Sun
and by others. Also, there is the Abstract Windowing Toolkit, which
provides a set of platform-independent, browser-embeddable GUI tools.

HotJava is the first (and certainly won't be the last) web browser
that allows you to have small Java programs (called applets) as an HTML
document type. These are obtained by the browser in the same way
it obtains a GIF, but they are interpreted and run on the client
machine. A Java program is compiled into Java bytecodes, which have
certain properties that prevent them from, say, breaking out of
their address space, playing cute games with the CPU, etc. Applets
are composed of bytecodes.

Most of the existing applets do stuff like 3D models you
can rotate with the mouse, irritating animations, and enhancements
to forms technology, but Java is a general-purpose language --
one of the most impressive applets I saw initially was a spreadsheet,
plonked down in the middle of a web page. Admittedly, it was a really
stupid spreadsheet, but it did a good job of convincing me that you
could really do anything with this stuff.

I don't get what you mean when you say, "Java isn't ready for the
home market." True, I don't think that programming languages of
any sort are part of the "home market", but I think that Java will
enable people like cypherpunks to write extremely portable applications
_once_ that will be embeddable on web pages viewed by browsers like
Netscape. I can't think of anything that is going to come closer to
your definition of "winning" the home market. Certainly the home
market will be dominated in short order by Win 95 and MacOS (mostly
the former.) I think the Win 95 port of the Java environment is only
awaiting release of Win 95, and the MacOS port has been demoed around town.

Also, Java is entirely orthogonal to issues like particular protocols
or formats, in the same sense the C or Smalltalk are orthogonal to
those same issues. It's just that we will be able to embed access to
those protocols and formats into the popular tools without huge
porting nightmares, or even requiring much cooperation from the
vendors themselves, who are often limited politically by what they
can put in themselves.