Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to A Technical Paper on Java

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Posted by Jonathan Ellis on
Just one nit --

at my current company we sell newspaper publishing software written primarily in Java.  (478 kloc Java for our custom apps, 97 kloc of C++ for InDesign plugins, 85 kloc of SQL, plus some php and 4D code that's in a different source tree and I'm too lazy to look up.)  It works quite well and although as everyone knows it's not really "write once run anywhere," porting from Win2k to OSX took one developper about two weeks and basically involved writing some classes to handle Mac file funkiness (resource forks and data forks and how they integrate, I think).  A Linux version would be probably be even less work but there is no market there so we'll probably never know.  Already though, Java is a big win over our previous C++ code that was a HUGE job to maintain for MacOS and WinNT.

So based on our experience I would say Java certainly has its place as a cross-platform environment for desktop apps, and IMO it is MUCH more enjoyable to code in than C++.  Just don't make me write web code with it. :)