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I agree completely: I think there used to be an educational discount for my region, which seems to have gone. In terms of their offical suppliers, information also appears to be outdated (I know you can download verson 2 but some of us still have a penchant for the physcial, and for the UK at least you only get pricing info on V1.2 http://www.ecomstation.co.uk/html/prices.html)

Poking around some of the other European suppliers (German language) sites indicates that a student/home user rate is available:

http://www.shop.appfox.de/Betriebssysteme/eComStation/eComStation-2...

which isn't *too* bad (esp. since you have up to 5 licences), but still high enough to put me off personally.

If I were Serenity Systems I would be doing a lot more to get information about my product out that was current and more easily understood (is there still a V2 upgrade from Warp 3, at all, as there was for 1.2? If not, why not - a clear explanation would be nice).

You must not have read the original comment I linked to.

Yes, there's a "Home and Student" edition, available for $149—it's this edition that I was referring to as "ridiculously overpriced" (even though it's less than the business edition). People who want a work OS will just spend the extra $50 and buy Windows 7. People who want to play with an OS will download one of the free ones.

Now I don't intend to spend for MS, but I regularly download "the free ones" and I'm using eCS rsp. OS/2 as my main system continuously for two decades now.
Somehow your statistics seem to be incomplete.

Now I don't intend to spend for MS, but I regularly download "the free ones" and I'm using eCS rsp. OS/2 as my main system continuously for two decades now.
Somehow your statistics seem to be incomplete. "

You apparently didn't read the original comment in this thread where I said that eComStation is overpriced "to encourage adoption by anyone other than legacy OS/2 users." "Legacy OS/2 users" would be you. I'm talking about adoption by new users.

Kind of 'whoops' - I am from the UK, and it seems SS is relying to an extent on regional suppliers. H2ORG in the UK definitely seems to be behind the times...

The cost may not be high if you divide it up by the number of licenses you get, but that doesn't mean I'd be willing to pay for all of them when I only (hypothetically) need one.

In my opinion eCS is really shooting themselves in the foot by not having a cheap/free student version. They could still make money off of the legacy OS/2 people, while at the same time hopefully getting some new people interested in using and potentially developing for eCS.

I know the price issue seems to come up in the comments every time there's an eComStation post, so I apologize if I am just beating a dead horse.

That is because the product is not FOR you or general users, it is for financial institutions that were using OS/2 and believe me they have the money.

And frankly I'd say that is a good thing too as the last thing eComstation needs to do is to try to compete in the general OS market. Not only is there a truly insane amount of hardware to support unless they decided to "do an Apple" and release their own machines, but frankly their OS is obviously 90s tech in a 21st century bling bling world.

Still I can see why some wanted Java ported as Java is still pretty big in financial circles so I'm happy for them. But there is simply no way for eComstation to compete in today's market, not with Windows 7, OSX lion, and of course a bazillion Linux distros all for free. Better they stick to their niche which is obviously still making them money after all these years or they wouldn't still be doing it.

You might be right—though personally I believe that such an approach would be incredibly short-sighted, since it would guarantee that their revenue could only go down as financial institutions transition to more widely-supported OS's (most ATMs in the US, at least, have already gone from OS/2 to Windows XP Embedded, from what I understand). However, I think you're wrong for one simple reason: if eComStation is only "for financial institutions that were using OS/2," why offer a Home and Student Edition at all? Generally, when businesses offer something for sale, they really do want to sell it, strangely enough.

Truth be told, there are very few financial institutions that are still running OS/2 either, with the exception of a few very old ATMs.

Try a job search on Dice for OS/2 and see how many results you get. And of the four results that even mention OS/2, how many of those actually look like OS/2 is relevant, and not just part of a long laundry list of generic skills they copied for their job description?

Areas of eComStation usage -- http://en.ecomstation.ru/solutions

Suh-weeet! How is the acpi support - frequncy scaling, suspend/resume? What laptop is it. Way cool!

it's an older HP pavilion, about 5 years old now. Everything works very well. Suspend and resume is a bit dodgy and when I close the lid it doesn't always suspend, but other than that everything works great. I'll update this post with the exact laptop specs when ig et home from work.

Still ugly and slow. At least the apps that I tested myself, namely Vuze, Open Office and Eclipse.

Is OpenOffice written in Java? I thought it was written in C++.

And I don't agree that Eclipse is slow. I use it as my primary IDE (even for non-Java development) and love it. No, it won't set any speed records, but what IDE does when you include all of its plugins?

Regarding the subject of the article: I loved OS/2 way back, and still have copies of Connect and Warp lying around. Maybe I'll set them up again and install Java.

Nah...

OpenOffice is not written in Java. It's written in C++. It has Java dependencies only for scripting purposes.

And as far as Eclipse... You started up Visual Studio .NET lately? All IDEs are slow.

Blaming Java for this is just ignorance, or anti-Java sentiment on your part.

Kdevelop... nice and fast!

But seriously, Java GUI's are pretty bad. I can't think of a good one. I was really hoping that Java on osx would be insanely great due to the closer integration, but they didn't really keep the development of it. Now I believe they've punted Java back to Oracle to develop for the system instead of tweaking it specifically for OSX.

Edited 2011-06-29 18:53 UTC

KDevelop is maybe 10% as powerful as Eclipse, NetBeans, or IDEA? Seriously, Kdevelop is a toy compared to any of the big three Java IDEs. It doesn't have nearly the features or capabilities



You just haven't looked at the right GUIs then. The following are all pure Java apps, using Swing. I would say these GUIs are up to par with any native application, wouldn't you?

http://www.techteam.gr/mac/screenshots/12094.jpg

http://www.ultramixer.com/products/res/pics/screenshot-ultramixer-3...

http://gopaultech.com/wp-content/images/looking_glass.jpg

http://sourceforge.net/dbimage.php?id=36036

http://www.jug-bb.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/netbeans67beta_osx....

Again, I think you just haven't looked at the right applications if you think all Java GUIs are pretty bad.

Edited 2011-06-29 19:51 UTC

Kdevelop is as much of an IDE as I need. A "More powerful" Ide doesn't do me any good if it consumes too much memory, is too slow, and suffers from stability and display integrity problems.

Now that I think of it, Slick edit is also incredibly fast, or was when I last used it six years ago.


Also you're sending me screen shots. I didn't mean they look bad, just that they perform poorly. Native applications run with in virtual machines run smoother than java applications on local host.

How much memory is too much? IDEA on my system typically uses around 200 Mb. I don't think that's bad for an IDE. And I've seen Firefox use more than that at times. Also, I don't have any slowness or stability problems with it either. It's a a little slow to start-up because of all the plugin modules it loads. But once it is running, it's plenty fast.



That hasn't been true for a long time now. The only time Java is really slower is on application start-up. Once the application is running, they are just about as fast as native applications.

It varies depending on the system. But using a ton of memory is a problem for Java applications as it will trigger more frequent garbage collections which I think may be behind some of the sluggish behaviour. To be honest I only accuse an app of taking up too much memory when I notice system wide slowdowns and or swapping. Eclipse is sluggish, so maybe I attribute that to memory, when it could just be the GUI speed problem regardless of memory.

For comparison Kdevelop is using 98 Mb right now. SlickEdit worked great on my 7 year old system with 128 mb total.



That's true today on my year old system.

Java is insanely great on OS X. As my first screenshot of the Java based financial management software Moneydance shows. The issue wasn't with Java, it was with Java developers who were not familiar with Macs, and didn't bother learning about how to set Apple's specific widget properties in order to rounded search boxes, brushed metal look, brushed metal style buttons, etc. Since most Java developers didn't have have Macs, they didn't spend anytime at all tweaking their apps for OS X. As a result, most Java apps on OS X use the older default Aqua look instead of the newer gray look. And they use the older Aqua style buttons instead of the newer style. Java supports the newer styles. But you have to enable them by passing properties to Java.

Edited 2011-06-29 20:08 UTC

No that might be great, but not insanely so. Java was supposed to be write once, run everywhere. I was hoping it wouldn't require any additional effort from developers. That a crappy app on windows ( due to the Java Gui problems) would be automatically awesome on the mac, due to the tweaks that Apple would make to the Java virtual machine.

It is write once, run anywhere with the cross platform GUI that gives you the same look and feel on all platforms. But obviously, you have to do some GUI tweaking if you want app that meets user expectations when it comes to look and feel on each platform.



Java looks pretty native on Windows these days. Crappy apps are almost always the fault of the developer. Not of Java itself.

And as long as you are on the subject of Kdevelop, I'd have to say Java on OS X achieves better look and feel / system integration than QT does. All QT apps I have seen on OS X look pretty awful

Absolutely true. I think QT apps on mac are pretty sad looking. The platform simply isn't a priority for Nokia.

That's not really true, just the fact that other IDE's are slow as well does not justify that Eclipse is slow. (And yes I think it's slow... Komodo IDE / PyCharm (based on IntelliJ) are all faster.

Also I do still think most java apps are slow... but that's not the worst.

In my experience (on Linux) java desktop applications are the only onces that can actually kill my desktop nowadays...

This goes for Eclipse (SWT), JDownloader (SWING?) and others..

The fact that they cannot seem to play nice with multiple screens, kill compiz every so often, mess with focus, steal focus with focus-follows-mouse... all means that I still tent to avoid java as the plague

I have never had any problems with Java on my Linux desktop, either with multiple monitors or compiz. And steal focus with focus-follows-mouse? I've never seen that happen. Not once. I would say though, that I have had plenty of focus stealing problems with native GTK apps.

I honestly think sometimes the people who say this stuff about Java on the Linux desktop are just making it up to trash Java. Neither I, nor anyone else I know who uses Java on the Linux desktop can reproduce any of these problems.

Eclipse is slower than NetBeans or IntelliJ IDEA, yes. Eclipse has not been doing a very good job of keeping up with the times.

As far as Komodo IDE, I agree it performs well as I have used it some. But I also felt like I was back in the stone age compared to IDEA. Komodo's refactoring and intelligent assist features and such are really pretty lacking compared to IDEA or NetBeans. NetBeans and IDEA also both have superior Javascript editing abilities (and given how much app development today involves Web apps and Javascript, I think good Javascript support is absolutely critical in a modern IDE).

Edited 2011-07-02 22:36 UTC

Heh, does Minecraft count?

I can't live without Intellij IDEA, which is the best programmer's IDE ever created. Also, I'm not a Ruby on Rails developer, but I do know several Ruby on Rails developers who swear by RubyMine, an IDE for Ruby on Rails development that is written in Java. I also know several PHP developers who love PhpStorm, again, written in Java.