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  • From: Calvin Powers <calvin AT cspowers.com>
  • To: "InterNetWorkers" <internetworkers AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: More thoughts on Microsoft and Java
  • Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 23:21:29 -0400


At 02:05 AM 7/23/2001 +0000, you wrote:
Calvin Powers <calvin AT cspowers.com> said:
> One activity that is going on is a movement to get PC sellers to bundle
> current Java runtime environment with the machines they sell, so that the
> end-user doesn't have to download or install anything.

The only situation this is an issue for in my opinion is applets.
Applications can bundle whatever JVM they want, as the JVM is no different
than any other development kit with runtime libraries.

Actually, I suppose you are right. Conceptually, there's not much difference between a C run time library and a JVM. And all the problems of having multiple copies of a c run-time library installed on a single system come into play. If an application puts it's own C runtime on the system and does it in such a way that it is visible to other apps that use the c-run time (i.e. put it in the path statement for all apps) then other apps can be broken because they depend on newer APIs that aren't in the back level APIs.

Side Note: Most development environments have a process by which you can rename the c runtime library that your app uses so that there is no possibility of interfering with other apps and no possibility of them interfering with you. I often wonder why this is not done more often.

Anyway, there's no reason a Java application can't bundle the runtime with the app and with a little bit of work, install it in such a way that there's no possibility that the app's Java vm is not visible to others so that there's no chance of messing up other apps that depend on a different level of VM.

Still, it would be nice to have a shared JVM on the system already. Ldt I checked, a minimal JRE was in the 12-16Mb range. So sharing a JVM install instead of bundling it in would save considerable disk space/download time. (hmm, but who cares about either these days, now that I think about it!)




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