multimedia software

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Harold wrote:
> 
> 
>>Probably due to loosing control of the software.  Right now java, as I
>>understand it, is meant to narrowly address programming needs without
>>allowing attacks such as activeX does.  This is probably a reason for
>>its popularity.
> 
> 
> That's not Java at all.  Java is a generalized programming language.  There
> has never been anything "narrow" about what it is "meant" to do, though the
> first few versions didn't quite meet up with the developers' vision.  Sun's
> vision was "write once, run anywhere" (that might not be quite the slogan
> they used...) and they seriously had hopes of it taking the world by storm
> and becoming the most used programming language.  If they'd made it open
> source, they might even have achieved that.
> 
> Its popularity is probably due to the fact that it's the one language that
> most colleges teach these days (though some are beginning to move to
> python).

I's much used in small devices - PDAs, phones and such, in web servers 
(as an alternative to php). Java is a much better language than C or C++ 
in that its design is intended to help programmers from making mistakes 
leading to buffer overruns, misused pointers, format string problems and 
so on.
Its big problem is that it's essentially an interpreted language with 
resultant performance hits, especially on zSeries, computers that have 
I/O to leave you gasping, but no CPU power to speak of. It can be 
compiled to native code, but then it's not portable any more. There are 
also JIT compilers, but they have their imperfections too.