Re: The Joy of Java

[mrm@netcom.com (Marianne Mueller)]

Perry writes: 

  You can do that safely without making it dangerous for your machine. I
  know how I would build a restricted execution environment for such
  markets. However, Java is 1) too slow, since if you are selling rendering
  cycles or such you don't want to be running an interpreter, 2)
  insufficently safe, and 3) paradoxically, insufficiently powerful for the
  sort of code you would want to run in such an environment. 

What solution is fast enough and safe enough and powerful enough?  Does
such a solution exist?  I say, No, it doesn't.  So let's quit pretending
that the Holy Grail exists, and get back to engineering. 

But let's not have a food fight.  Although entertaining in the short term,
food fights are actually deathly boring and incredibly unfruitful in the
long term.  I'm interested in helping people do interesting things in a
reasonably secure way, on the internet, using Java.  We're working on a
response to the Felten el al. paper, which will be posted to the net
shortly.  I think some of their points are perfectly valid, some of their
points are irrelevant, and a lot of the presentation is melodramatic. 
Melodrama is good for sound bites, I guess. 

Marianne
working on Java security stuff at Sun