Hi,
JavaOne was about the progress of Java, and all the new Java
versions and APIs.
Java is making great progress in mobil phones and other
hand-helds, in credit cards (Visa is sponsoring a programming
contest for best apps for its Java cards), and in the big
servers that those phones and credit cards connect to.
Perhaps best for VisAD, Sony announced this week that Java
runs on its PS2 (Play Station 2) game console. Hopefully
they will also port Java3D to the PS2 (its seems natural
they will). Then we could all buy our vis systems at
Toys-R-Us.
Full Sail showed off their Java game development tool using
Java3D. It performs very fast. A game that took two weeks
to develop using their tool, looks just like any arcade game
and runs just as fast. I hear it was a big hit at the game
developer conference. Wide-spread adoption of Java by game
developers will be very good for the VisAD community.
JDK 1.4 will support 64-bit addressing, which will be very
good for all of us with large data sets. After all, it doesn't
cost much for a machine with more than 2 or 4 GB these days.
There are also new language and API features coming. Assertions
and generics (templates) in the language, and lots of new
APIs.
However, the reason we all adopted Java is for its platform
independence. I am afraid that if we utilize new features
in VisAD we will leave behind some platforms, where those
features have not been ported, or some users who don't want
to upgrade their Java versions.
VisAD will exploit the new capabilities of Java3D, but it
will do it via reflection so the VisAD code will still
compile with older Java3D versions. It will also check at
run time if the new version of Java3D is installed and only
use new features if the new version is installed.
Those of us developing code for the VisAD distribution will
follow this approach, and generally avoid new language and
API features unless they are essential.
However, we cannot avoid new features forever. So I am
very interested to hear from the community about when you
will be able to tolerate migration of VisAD to new Java
language versions and APIs?
We are especially interested to hear from anyone for whom
version migration will be a hardship. For example, if you
are writing applications to run on old machines.
Cheers,
Bill
----------------------------------------------------------
Bill Hibbard, SSEC, 1225 W. Dayton St., Madison, WI 53706
hibbard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 608-263-4427 fax: 608-263-6738
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/vis.html
