[geeks] Misuse of Java

[Jonathan C Patschke]

Disclaimer:  I like Java, and I think it's a Good Thing.  However, I 
don't think it's appropriate for everything; there's very little that 
is.

It seems like every program that comes from Sun these days ships with 
an installer written in Java against what has to be one of the world's 
slowest installation toolkits.  You pop in the CD, and (if you're 
running CDE), you get to wait a couple of minutes for the first window 
to pop up, and then you get the slug through dialog after dialog of 
crap, and then wait nearly forever while things get installed.

Here's what I don't get:
   1)  Why waste all that CPU time on a Java app that's only going to 
run on one platform, anyway?  Why not build it in C, or, hell, TCL/Tk?
   2)  What was wrong with pkgadd, wrapped in a little shell script for 
picking package bundles?

My current data-point comes from Forte 6.1, which takes several -hours- 
to install from CDROM on an Ultra 1e if you select to install 
everything from the installation program.  However, if you just "cd 
/cdrom/cdrom0/products/packages ; yes | pkgadd -d. *", the process 
takes about fifteen -minutes-.  A good part of this sloth can be 
attributed to the stupidity of Sun's installation framework, which 
doesn't handle overlapping bundles properly (all the overlapping bits 
get installed N times).  Part of it is just that the installation 
program is that slow.  Hopefully, so long as Sun ships applications 
with this sluggish installer, they'll keep the SysV packages nicely 
exposed so that we can just use pkgadd.

I'm bothered by the fact that this trend doesn't seem to be stopping at 
installation gizmos.  More and more Solaris-specific administration 
utilities are being written in Java by Sun.  I know it's typically a 
lot easier to hammer out an app in Java than in C, but are Sun's 
programmers really -that- strapped for time, or have they forgotten 
that not everyone has a Blade 2000 or an Ultra 80 on their desk?  Or 
are the Java programmers on the Solaris team simply not up-to-speed on 
how to make a Java/Swing application more optimized?

--
Jonathan C. Patschke
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