Sun To Build World's Biggest App Store Around Java

CWmike writes "Sun Micro plans to launch an App Store that could make Apple's look smaller than a 7-Eleven by comparison, CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote on his blog this week. Schwartz indicated the Java App Store, code-named Project Vector, will focus on PC users and estimated the size of the community at 1 billion. Sun plans to allow Java application developers to submit programs to a simple Web site so the company can evaluate them for safety and content before presenting them to the Java audience. Sun will charge for distribution. The company will reveal more details at its JavaOne conference, which opens June 2 in San Francisco, Schwartz said."

Re:You forgot something

[Mystra_x64]

It seems NetBeans authors are "stupid and don't know how to code" sadly. Because it eats about 400 MB of RAM while opening 4 KB Javascript file.

Better question..

[QuantumG]

Why do they need to review it? Can't they enforce a safe subset and give the user graded security options.. I kinda remember that being the point of the Java sandbox.

Apps that are only allowed to read/write to restricted local storage and can only access files that the user specifically selected with an Open/Save File Dialog sounds plenty secure to me. Some similar restrictions for socket access.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[setagllib]

You realise Pidgin is written in C, right?

Re:Go Java!

[kramulous]

Go elegant.

I realise that java code looks elegant. That things are also easy to program. But have you ever examined the callstack? Do yourself a favour sometime and see why Java is slow as dogs balls, memory hungry and anything but elegant.

Part of what I do is manage the applications running on a couple of HPC machines and when things are really busy, guess which jobs get pushed aside for resource hogging?

Re:Package Management for Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

I already search only one location for Windows app. SourceForge.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[BikeHelmet]

I'm glad this got modded Redundant. Someone here knows something about Java!

Re:What on earth makes you think users are relucta

[vadim_t]

Normal users don't even know what the hell the JRE is, nor do they care how secure it is at any moment. Give them an installer and care not at all what the app they are about to use is written in.

Actually as an user, I really hate Java apps. I've just never seen a good one. I've also seen very few which probably doesn't help.

Limewire and Azureus are big and slow, even on quite modern hardware. Azureus happily eats 512MB RAM (which is still a very sizable chunk of a modern system). It also uses quite a bit of CPU.

But what really made me hate Java for applications was Freenet. I'm convinced that doing it in Java was a horrible mistake that dramatically limited its userbase. Back when it was new and came up on Slashdot once in a while, Freenet was near impossible to run along with anything else. A box with 128MB RAM could run Apache without any problems, but freenet would bring it to its knees.

The fundamental problem I have is: That somehow the two simple tasks "download files" and "serve files" that could be done on a Pentium 1 with 32MB RAM on the background without the user noticing were turned into huge resource consuming applications.

What happened in the end is that I gave up on freenet, because it'd get my box to OOM every day or so, and got rid of Limewire and Azureus as soon as I managed to find a replacement. Now I use rtorrent and KTorrent.

Resuming: An user may not know what a JRE is, but that's precisely why they don't understand why they have to install one, and Java appears to equal non-standard UI and horrible memory hogging. Not good.

Incorrect. DEVELOPERS have preferred writing native apps. But what if suddenly a lot of useful small utilities appear here, and more and more people start using the app store - people didn't get in on the iPhone app store at first either but when enough people get involved the network effect becomes a powerful force indeed.

Actually no. As a developer I prefer to develop in whatever is easiest for the task at hand. I'll code in Perl on Windows if it's a task Perl is well suited to. But if I coded for other people I wouldn't get a whole lot of users that way.

When I code for other people on Windows, I open Visual Studio, because that produces applications that look native for their system and which install without problems.

Re:You forgot something

[elnyka]

In that perfect world of yours that might be true. With the JVM, however, except for toy apps or very small non-general purpose apps, you'll leak up to the waazoo regardless of how you try.

It is a known fact that several JVMs out there do leak just by running. Even if you try, Java, with its language constructs, makes it difficult to control memory management and fine tuning.

In other words, you don't know what you are talking about, college fan boy. Remember that before you assume memory hungriness is the result of stupidity.

That is not to say that there are not shitty, idiotic Java programmers out there.

Re:You forgot something

[Neuroprophet]

Interesting. That hasn't been my experience at all. I work at a major investement bank and the majority of the middle tier of our trading systems are now written in Java. Have been for years. I'm not talking web based apps either. These days the back ends of a lot of the trading systems are a collection of Java apps running on Linux servers (usuall Red Hat) using using pub/sub messaging for communication and jdbc to connect to Oracle, Sybase or DB2.

I've been doing this for a while (10+ years) and went through the progression of doing everything in C, then C++, then Java. When told to start using Java to say I was skeptical would be an understatement. But over the years Java has become great for this purpose. We experience no random memory growth (leaked memory) from our processes. We leave them up for weeks on end processing large volumes of trades with no issues. Since we run our programs for long periods of time startup time isn't an issue and really doesn't take that long anymore anyway. The time saved coding in Java instead of C++ is also beneficial. No more having to learn every vendor's version of their C++ threading library and trying to stitch it all together in one app. Too many times would I have to write an app using serveral vedor libs that I would need to modify and they all implemented threading, logging, etc. their own way. So as you jump from one file to another there is no consistency on how things are being done. Maintenance nightmare and the learning curve is huge for new members of the team.

Plus, as a manager trying to hire competent C++ programmers out of college is almost impossible. Seems like many schools just don't teach it anymore. So if HR only gives you a junior programmer budget and you need a C++ programmer you end up getting the guy nobody else would hire.

Disclaimer: Above experience anecdotal. I'm sure there are people out there who have had really bad experiences.

Re:After 14 years Java apps are still 2nd class

[WankersRevenge]

Hey Putaro, I'm also developing java apps for the mac, and I got to say that it is hard, but it can work out. First, you should google mac widgets which makes swing widgets look very very pretty on a mac. It doesn't look too bad either on Windows (kind of looks like ITunes on windows) which is fine by me. Otherwise, I think the native look and feel for swing widgets isn't so bad in Windows. And as another poster replied, there's always SWT.

As for NetBeans, Matisse is a good tool but I can't be productive in it. I don't know the group layout very well. I don't want to know the group layout and I hate dealing with wizard generate code. In the past two months, I've discovered Mig Layout which is by far, the best layout managers for java. I now mock up my layout in photoshop, then code it in Mig. People are trying to have it included in the JRE. It's just that good. And bonus ... it works the same for Swing as well as SWT.

Personally, I'd recommend you package your java app differently for each platform. There are a ton of open source java installers which actually download the JRE if there isn't one on the client's platform.

Java does work for the desktop. It just takes a crapload of spit and polish. If isn't doing what you need it do, I'd work hard as hell to research a solution, and if that still doesn't work, then you need reevaluate your language choice. Personally, in terms of java desktop development, I have yet to find a barrier that I could not cross.

Re:Go Java!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Part of what I do is manage the applications running on a couple of HPC machines and when things are really busy, guess which jobs get pushed aside for resource hogging?

Part of what I do is manage java middleware that services thousands of concurrent clients while maintaining performance in the 200-300TPS range, with an SLA to the client applications of less than 100 ms - and that includes round-trip time to the data providers, some of which may be several tiers removed.

So - what's your point again?

Look, I'm not saying Java is good for everything - it's a tool and like any other tool you should use the best one for the job. But you should also base your decisions on data that is more recent than your desktop experience with Java ten years ago.