Thursday, December 05, 2002

Open Updates Looks like Microsoft is taking something of a beating in court right now on the Java issue. I don't know whether they'll win or lose in the end, but if they win, there is some significant probability that Sun will get a writ forcing Microsoft to include the Java runtime in Windows. That's all well and good for Sun, at that particular moment in time. What happens in the future? What happens when Sun wants to push a new version of something out to its customers? What happens if some other company wants to? Right now Microsoft has a pretty cool update mechanism in place. It keeps track of various Microsoft components, allows you to install new versions, tells you when new versions of things are available, and will even download and install them automatically. That is a very substantial channel for controlling what is on the desktop. What we need is some kind of software distribution channel, just like the one Microsoft has, except that it's an open playing field. I think it would be very interesting if a judge forced Microsoft to include something like that. Through this channel other companies (not just Microsoft) could push new product, check versions, and keep their customers up to date. There is some risk of computer ecological disaster with a lot of stuff running around, but I think that engineering challenge can be solved. The bandwidth that underlies all of this must be provided by the companies, of course -- only the updating mechanism must be provided by Microsoft. There are a whole host of issues to be solved -- what about companies that don't act in a trustworthy manner? Who gets to be included in the software catalog? What about conflicting updates? 10:15:18 PM

The VM or the Language? What I'd really like (though knowing Sun this isn't going to happen) is that this JSR release a reference implementation of this compiler for the new Java langauge that spits out standard byte codes which work on any 1.2 or greater JVM. Then we can all jump to the new Java language (via a reusable Ant task or Maven plugin) without waiting until every end user of our software is on JDK1.5.  Right now take up of JDK 1.4 is very slow since there are still so many people using JDK 1.2 and JDK 1.3 in production. I'd like us to be able to start using this new language now, without waiting for the entire planet to upgrade to the 1.5 platform before we can take advantage of the new language features. [James Strachan's Radio Weblog] I gotta disagree with James here...I'd much rather see the VM modified to do some of the cross-language things that we need.  Of course, maybe that is a Java VM 2.0 thing.  But that could take a very long time.  Looks like the current proposals are compiler-side.  I wrote a bit about functions in Java and how I think they would be useful.  I still think they'd be a powerful addition.  The for loop thing is extremely sugary.  Let's get functional types!!! 11:09:45 AM