[617] in java-interest
Re: Java: The Inside Story
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chris Warth)
Sat Jul 8 01:59:56 1995
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 1995 10:03:51 -0700
From: csw@scndprsn.Eng.Sun.COM (Chris Warth)
To: java-interest@java.Eng.Sun.COM
> I've just read the new SunWorld article, "Java: The inside story", over
> the long weekend. It's a very good article and is highly recommended
> for anyone interested in Java/HotJava. The article is on-line at:
>
> http://www.sun.com:80/sunworldonline/swol-07-1995/swol-07-java.html
>
> In fact, I'll recommend the java home page to added a link pointing
> to it.
The article is interesting, and I suspect it will be just the first of
a number of articles that document where Java came from. Some people
in this list and elsewhere have expressed the misconception that we sat
down to write a browser with executable content and hence Java was
born. It should be obvious now that that was not the case, and the
journey to where we are now is interesting by itself.
On the other hand the SunWorld article is based largely on the
recollections of one person, particularly the part about the history of
the Green project, and as a result represents just one view of the
events going back almost 5 years. There are some inaccuracies and the
situation was often much more complicated than a short article can
express.
I'm afraid that if we put this article off our home page we will than
also be obliged to put in the inevitable letters to the editor
correcting some of the inaccuracies, and responses to those letters,
etc. Nonetheless this history should probably be available from our
home page as it's the only one of its kind.
>
> 1) ...
> The article didn't identify when the concept of "downloadable applets"
> was evolved. Was it a part of the original "Green" project? or was it
> introduced in Naughton's 1st Java Web browser that he did over a
> weekend? Without an infrastructure, HTTP/HTML in this case, the
> client/server architecture and downloadable applets are not natural
> concepts to evolve.
I would say the concept of downloadable code was there from the
beginning - that is one of the reasons architecture independence was so
important. I don't recall anyone saying the word "applet" in the Green
days. We were originally going to download user interface code or
software upgrades into things like thermostats and VCR's. The first
implementation of networking in Java didn't do any of that, though. We
originally had a transparant RPC mechanism that didn't transfer any
code, just object handles.
So downloadable code was there in the Green plan, applets came with the
browser.
>
> 2) According to the article, there will be a new version of browser
> by the end of summer.
>
...
> However, reading this list suggests that Sun's also working on
> rewriting the AWT library. It's unclear that Gosling's comment is
> referring to works on browser port such as those for Win95 and
> Mac, or works on browser components such as awt.* stuff. Both work
> are important. One is to build the install base and the other to
> solidify Java's library and environment. I hope Sun success on
> doing both.
The AWT is be rewritten to provide some of the functionality we need to
do more interesting applets and to write a more complete browser, with
multiple views, embeddable widgets classes, etc. The new prowser James
referred to is simply our Beta release, which we hope will be a lot
more interesting than the Alpha.
-csw
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