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NOTICE: This version of the NSF Unidata web site (archive.unidata.ucar.edu) is no longer being updated.
Current content can be found at unidata.ucar.edu.
To learn about what's going on, see About the Archive Site.
Hi, JavaOne was about the progress of Java, and all the new Java versions and APIs. Java is making great progress in mobil phones and other hand-helds, in credit cards (Visa is sponsoring a programming contest for best apps for its Java cards), and in the big servers that those phones and credit cards connect to. Perhaps best for VisAD, Sony announced this week that Java runs on its PS2 (Play Station 2) game console. Hopefully they will also port Java3D to the PS2 (its seems natural they will). Then we could all buy our vis systems at Toys-R-Us. Full Sail showed off their Java game development tool using Java3D. It performs very fast. A game that took two weeks to develop using their tool, looks just like any arcade game and runs just as fast. I hear it was a big hit at the game developer conference. Wide-spread adoption of Java by game developers will be very good for the VisAD community. JDK 1.4 will support 64-bit addressing, which will be very good for all of us with large data sets. After all, it doesn't cost much for a machine with more than 2 or 4 GB these days. There are also new language and API features coming. Assertions and generics (templates) in the language, and lots of new APIs. However, the reason we all adopted Java is for its platform independence. I am afraid that if we utilize new features in VisAD we will leave behind some platforms, where those features have not been ported, or some users who don't want to upgrade their Java versions. VisAD will exploit the new capabilities of Java3D, but it will do it via reflection so the VisAD code will still compile with older Java3D versions. It will also check at run time if the new version of Java3D is installed and only use new features if the new version is installed. Those of us developing code for the VisAD distribution will follow this approach, and generally avoid new language and API features unless they are essential. However, we cannot avoid new features forever. So I am very interested to hear from the community about when you will be able to tolerate migration of VisAD to new Java language versions and APIs? We are especially interested to hear from anyone for whom version migration will be a hardship. For example, if you are writing applications to run on old machines. Cheers, Bill ---------------------------------------------------------- Bill Hibbard, SSEC, 1225 W. Dayton St., Madison, WI 53706 hibbard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 608-263-4427 fax: 608-263-6738 http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/vis.html
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