[PLUG] Speaking of the Termination of Distributions

Thu Oct 2 22:47:02 UTC 2003

I did quite a bit of work with Swing for a 3 year period and did some 
fairly complex GUIs that were used in a client/server system that 
manages airliner maintenance data. Initially we were using NT 4.0 
clients with 500MHZ PII and things didn't perform all that well. Later 
one when all of the clients got upgraded to 1GHZ PIII running Win2K it 
was hard to tell the difference between the native Window programs or 
the Java ones as the performance of the Swing clients was quite good. 
We used the Java look and feel "Metal" by default so it was obvious we 
were using Java.

The biggest problem for our UI client was that Swing seems to having all 
of the objects holding references to every other object and so the 
swing objects didn't seem to get cleaned up in a timely manner actually 
causing our client to throw OutOfMemoryErrors. I had to write gobs of 
extra code to try to do things like empty  out all of the Containers 
recursively within a window to try to give the GC enough hints that it 
would actually reap the objects. 

I spent weeks running the client through JProbe taking heap snapshots 
and adding code to get things to be garbage collected. The Observable 
pattern is used extensively in the Swing/AWT so objects are holding 
references all over the place which makes it hard to get GC working 
well sometimes. Anyone that says (and I've heard it) "That you don't 
need to worry about memory leaks and other problems in Java." is 
smoking something.

On the server side, where we had no GUI code and only did DB access and 
business rules, we never saw any huge memory leak problems. I found a 
few minor memory leaks with JProbe but nothing compared to what 
AWT/Swing seems to do on its own. I'll have to look at SWT if I work on 
an other Java-based GUI. Lately I've been only doing a bit of EJB work 
in Java and most of my work has shifted over to C++ using Linix and 
Oracle.

C++ was a bit of shock for me after doing nothing but Java programming 
since 1996. Before that I did 5 years of C++ programming under HP/UX 
and thought I knew C++ but it's changed allot with the addition of a 
Standard C++ library. I had a bit of a rocky start but after a couple 
of weeks I've gotten back into the C++ groove and it's been mostly a 
matter of getting up to speed with the STL for me. I've found the 
Josuttis C++ library reference pretty indispensable and I wouldn't be 
as far along on my C++ project had it not been for that book.

Tony

On Thursday 02 October 2003 19:20 pm, Holger Stephan wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 17:30, Kyle Hayes wrote:
> > Maybe.  Java may well be toast anyway because Sun never let it
> > leave home. This has frustrated IBM and other companies that wanted
> > to really push Java for years.   Losing its parent could kill it
> > off completely.
>
> Possibly, but quite unlikely. For enterprise and on large scale,
> framework supported server side there is .NET and Java.
>
> > than Java I suspect.  Is anyone really deploying much Java on
> > Windows these days (apart from the odd applet)?  I know most
> > development of Java is done on Windows because that is where the
> > good IDEs are, but deployment?
>
> The reason most Java developers are on Windows has nothing to do with
> the development tools. There is Forte, Eclipse and others. They work
> beautifully on Linux.
>
> There are still not many Java client side applications in general.
> Main reason is limitations of the GUI (AWT and then Swing). There is
> a new star on the Java GUI sky: SWT. It is excellent and may well
> make the difference. Eclipse is built using SWT. It is still young
> but we are already moving over from Swing. SWT roots to and is backed
> by IBM btw.
>
> > So, the shops that use Java will probably continue to do so
> > provided that the licensing is handled by the company that buys it.
> >  I cannot see Sun's management selling off anything to MS even in
> > extremis. I'd guess that IBM will pick up Java and then throw it
> > over the wall to some other organization. IBM makes a lot of money
> > on Java.
>
> That is true. Java has become a big chunk, not only for IBM.
>
> > There is also the point that Java on Linux has never been that
> > strong, so if Linux is taking over the server world, Java really
> > isn't in the picture anyway.
>
> That's no longer the case. For a while Java even run better on Linux
> than on Solaris. Java will grow with Linux on the server side.
>
> > Productivity and Sun were the two reasons that made me shift away
> > from Java coding four years ago.  I haven't felt that to be a
> > mistake yet.
> >
> > If Java sails off into the land where FORTAN and COBOL live, will
> > universities still use Java as the primary instruction language in
> > CS courses?
>
> Lately, Java has been doing better than expected. This has surprised
> analysts who expected .NET to take a bigger chunk out of the Java
> server market. One indicator are job openings, and they speak for
> Java, nation wide and here in Portland.
>
> Also, don't forget other areas Java is penetrating quite
> successfully: mobile and wireless, and the embedded software field.
>
> - Holger
>
>
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-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at comcast.net