[Discuss] cloud storage

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey)]

> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
> bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of Tom Metro
> 
> Steve dismissed out of hand a few products that met the security
> criteria, but where implemented in Java (like Wuala). His take is that
> Java is fine for a free product, but a for-profit service should use
> platform-specific native clients. He sees Java as a toy. (I'm no big fan
> of Java, but this seems to be a bit unjustified and obsolete criticism
> of the language. 

Yeah - That seems like a curmudgeon-ish prejudice.  The idea that nothing
worth while could possibly be written in java.  

Let's consider for a moment, what java is.  It's a virtual machine that
abstracts the runtime environment, both for the purpose of being
cross-platform compatible, and for process and memory management/process
management.  Just like a web browser running a bunch of tabs viewing the
internet and each running their own separate javascript, just like an
operating system kernel, it is designed to keep separate processes separate
from each other and unable to step on or squash each other with memory leaks
or buffer overflows.  Java *increases* security relative to C.  (None of
these things offer perfect security, but they all offer increase of security
relative to raw coding in C/ASM).

What's more - The only ding against Java would be to claim performance
degradation.  I can't say there's no performance degradation in any
situation, but I can say there's no performance degradation in the
situations at hand.   ;-)   Because if you have a 100% cpu-bound work load,
then sure Java will be slower.  But if your bottleneck is the disk or the
network, then there is no performance degradation.

What's more & more - Consider your alternatives.  Maybe you'll code the
windows application using C# or anything else based on .Net.  This provides
the same abstraction levels (implemented differently) and the argument is
fundamentally the same as the argument against java.  On the mac & linux -
maybe java, mono, python, boost, objective c.  Whatever, the argument
against java is equally applicable to all of these and all the other
alternatives.  It seems silly and insecure and unstable to eliminate every
single one of these for raw C or ASM coding.  (I know, nobody advocated raw
C or ASM, but that's the only way you get out of the argument against java.)