OS/2 e-Zine! - Chris' Rant

Chris' Rant

- by Chris Wenham

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Close to the end of each month I enter a mild panic when I don't know what to write about in this column, and usually, at the end of each month, someone does something fabulously stupid and my writer's block goes away like magic.

Last year Sun gave us a new programming language and promised earnestly that true platform independent applications were but a few Software Development Kits away -- Java.

Last month Microsoft announced they were splitting their own version of Java away from the standard and making a compiler that would produce Windows-only Java binaries -- Excrement.

This is an act of stupidity and a stroke of genius rolled into one, if there ever could be such a thing. I'm sure Microsoft is giving itself a darn good pat on the back, running through the halls of Redmond campus shouting, "It's Unix all over again!" and contributing once again to the rape of an idea they were too dumb to think of themselves. But I also think they've not-so-intelligently created their own competitor to ActiveX, given developers one more API to deal with, and diversified their product line with something that can only possibly be called the fifth wheel of programming languages.

For crying out loud, if you're only going to develop for Windows anyway, why the heck not write it in C++ or Visual Basic?

Perhaps the Surgeon General can put a warning sticker on the new Microsoft Java packages; "Warning: useless to anybody unless compiled for platform independence."

It's my sincere hope that developers consider just exactly what the point of Java is. It's the Platform Independent nature of it that makes it more than just another ho-hum C wannabe and a momentary blip of a fad on the Internet radar screen. It's neither rocket science nor a carefully guarded secret that spawning off proprietary and incompatible versions of this language will make it as complex and out-of-reach for the average user as today's Unix systems are.

But a trend has been set by the biggest trendsetter of the industry, is it any surprise that companies like Borland, Silicon Graphics and others are either supporting it wholeheartedly or trying to pull off the same trick themselves?

I was skeptical and worried when IBM fell in love with Java so quickly and, to all outward appearances, seemed to be hinging OS/2's success on it as well. Now I'm more worried, because it seemed at first that we would all walk down a yellow brick road; we learn instead that Oz has a toll booth at its gates, and we all use the wrong currency to get in.

Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company -- Wenham's Web Works. He has written comedy, sci-fi, HTML, Pascal, C++ and now writes software reviews.

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