Rik Ling <rli### [at] pipcomcom> wrote:
: Have you considered (yikes!) Java?

  I think that Java is not an option nowadays, because:

  a) Java is slow. Someone should think that just a GUI for povray doesn't
need much speed, but usually they are using some pentium 150MHz. Not all
the people are using superfast machines. I usually use a sparcstation
which is about as fast as a 486 50MHz, and java is extremely slow here.
I can't even think of editing a 5000-lines long text in a java editor.
  b) Java compilers are not very usual (I mean compilers that make actual
machine-code, runnable binary data, like c-compilers) and usually java-coders
don't like them (it seems to break the principles of java).
  c) Java is hardly portable. This may sound crazy, but it's true. Usually
you need a web browser to run java (this adds slowness to the whole thing).
There are also appletviewers, but they don't differ much from the browsers.
Every browser has its own implementation of the java virtual machine, and
this implementation usually differs from other browsers.
  I once made a school work with a friend with java (a simple povray
modeller). We developed it in a sparcstation with an appletviewer and
netscape 3. It worked ok (although there were some minor problems with
the appletviewer, which we thought were bugs of it).
  Then we tested it with other browsers: With netscape 4 in the same
sparc it didn't work correctly. In win95 netscape 3 it didn't work
correctly (although you could make images). In win95 netscape 4 it didn't
work at all (the GUI showed, but it crashed and showed an error message).
It didn't work in MSIE either (only a gray square appeared).
  This isn't a unique case. I have seen other big applets too which don't
work in this sparc with netscape 3 or 4 or the appletviewer, and I have
been told they don't work in every windows browser either.
  This doesn't mean that it's not possible to make applets which work
everywhere. It means that it's not _easy_. With nowaday browsers, java
definitely is not "write once, run everywhere", but "write once, test
everywhere, fix many times".

  Just my opinion.

-- 
                                                           - Warp. -

Post a reply to this message