Minutes from the August 8, 1996 GUI meeting


Present: Nobu, Lee, Dhiman, Ken Stox

Primary topic: Ken Stox discussed Java

Scribe: Lee

We spent the hour getting Ken Stox's impression of Java. 
He said it looks interesting and seems to be evolving quickly. 
Though still embryonic, there is much activity going on in 
the development of class libraries and many new developmant 
tools are available. As in C++, Java forces up-front design  
and developmant, which is good. There are many developmant 
environments and java engines available including the following:

	1. Kafe
	2. gnu
	3. JDK MicroSoft
	4. COSMO SGI
	5. Java SUN

One result of using Java will be to force us to client/server 
type approaches, also good. How interprocess communication is done, 
Ken was not clear on and suggested we look more at this. Also, 
how does Java deal with shared memory? In many of these issues the 
advantage of languages such as  TCL or Python is that you are 
much closer to the system and can do system type things more easily. 

We discussed graphics, and Ken mentioned AWT (Another Window Toolkit). 
Java is good at certain kinds of graphics. 

On security, Ken has some misgivings. He asked if it could read and 
write files? If yes, then getting random applets from the web could 
potentially do nasty stuff where you do not want them  to. (In fact,
reading and writing local files is not allowed by imported applets run
under a web viewer. These and many other security features are built 
into Java. In stand alone applications, there are fewer restrictions.)

On Multi-threading " it's awesome!"

On efficiency, it's getting better and if the interest continues 
there may be chips designed just for Java. 

Ken felt that there would possibly be a longer startup time 
associated with using Java than other options, such as TCL, 
but he thought it would pay off greatly in the future. Ken still 
is an ardent Python fan and feels it is a "better technology", but 
Java seems to be taking over.