OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/24031/Google_WebP_Format_Gets_Java_Decoder Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Sun, 26 May 2013 07:24:57 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Always makes me smile http://www.osnews.com/thread?449936 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449936 Sorry for being a grammer nazy, but their is no such thing as native when talking about Java*. I mean Java isn't native on any platform. ;-)

It's all extra layers. You could say, a pure Java WebP decoder. That would make more sense.

* OK, their is JNI, but that is using native libraries from within Java Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Lennie) Comments Java ??? http://www.osnews.com/thread?449937 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449937 Why not C? Most system level software and many libraries are in C. Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (evert) Comments RE: Always makes me smile http://www.osnews.com/thread?449938 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449938 not if you think of java(JVM) as the platform ;) Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (nabil2199) Comments Java on web is slow http://www.osnews.com/thread?449940 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449940 Sun never cared about it and neither does Oracle.
So you encode your pictures differently to save a new bytes of traffic but you're now serving a Java applet.

Also, its slow as hell to start up a vm in a web browser. Thats why Java applets, Java web start, and JavaFx never took off. Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (FunkyELF) Comments RE: Java ??? http://www.osnews.com/thread?449943 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449943 WebP is based from VP8 and VP8 is from Google.
From what I could gather Google is none too keen on C.
Calls it "unnecessary complicated" and is the reason it is developing Go.

I myself don’t know anything about C++ and can’t give an informed opinion on the legitimacy of Google's claims except from posts I read about C.
The gist of it is as I have it is that C++ is difficult to master but very robust.

Maybe other comments can enlighten us. Sun, 14 Nov 2010 22:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (fran) Comments RE: Java ??? http://www.osnews.com/thread?449944 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449944
Why not C? Most system level software and many libraries are in C.

The original Webp decoder is in c (and some assembly iirc), I don't think this java decoder has anything to do with Google apart from it decoding Google's WebP format. Sun, 14 Nov 2010 22:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Valhalla) Comments RE: Java ??? http://www.osnews.com/thread?449945 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449945
Why not C? Most system level software and many libraries are in C.

Because there already is a library written in C called libvpx - the same library used for VP8 encoding and decoding. Sun, 14 Nov 2010 22:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Quikee) Comments What’s impressive http://www.osnews.com/thread?449946 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449946 If WebP is just a fourcc, a data chunk length, and the data… isn’t that a few lines of code in any language?
And then it feeds the data to the VP8 decoder!

It boggles my mind that this is news. Sun, 14 Nov 2010 22:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Beta) Comments RE: What�s impressive http://www.osnews.com/thread?449947 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449947 Right, all the hard work is writing the Java VP8 decoder. It's all part of the same project. Sun, 14 Nov 2010 23:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Brooss) Comments RE: Java on web is slow http://www.osnews.com/thread?449951 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449951 It's actually gotten a lot better on Windows in recent years. On Mac it is still kinda slow to start up. I totally agree though that embedding a Java applet in order to show an image in a different format is the definition of counter-intuitive.... Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Moochman) Comments Not the point... http://www.osnews.com/thread?449955 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449955 Reading the link, the point was never to create a WebP decoder in java. They're trying to port libvpx, and are using WebP as a testcase to show that decoding keyframes is now working (mostly) correctly. Mon, 15 Nov 2010 01:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (smitty) Comments RE[2]: Java ??? http://www.osnews.com/thread?449956 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449956
WebP is based from VP8 and VP8 is from Google.
From what I could gather Google is none too keen on C.
Calls it "unnecessary complicated" and is the reason it is developing Go.

I myself don’t know anything about C++ and can’t give an informed opinion on the legitimacy of Google's claims except from posts I read about C.
The gist of it is as I have it is that C++ is difficult to master but very robust.

Maybe other comments can enlighten us.


Yet they developed Google Chrome in...C++... Mon, 15 Nov 2010 01:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (benhonghu) Comments RE: What�s impressive http://www.osnews.com/thread?449957 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449957 if a computer is just a bunch of wire and transistor anyway, isn't that a few number of switch in different form ?
And then it need the switch to be faster!

I boggles my mind that you are unimpressed. Mon, 15 Nov 2010 02:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dvhh) Comments Comment by kaiwai http://www.osnews.com/thread?449995 http://www.osnews.com/thread?449995 It would be great if they moved it forward so that it supported WebM so that one doesn't need to rely on the web browser developer to update their browser - it will also be good for those running browsers before Internet Explorer 9 as well. Reminds me very much of the vorbis audio player written in Java on Wikipedia ;) Mon, 15 Nov 2010 11:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kaiwai) Comments RE: Java ??? http://www.osnews.com/thread?450012 http://www.osnews.com/thread?450012
Why not C? Most system level software and many libraries are in C.

For one simple reason.... There are many better languages than C! ;-)Edited 2010-11-15 15:07 UTC Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ggeldenhuys) Comments RE: Always makes me smile http://www.osnews.com/thread?450024 http://www.osnews.com/thread?450024 No, its native to Java. Native and foreign are relative qualifiers.

I'll never forget this guy I met ( recent emigrant from another country to the us), who used to rail against all of the "foreigners" here, including a co-worker that was Cherokee. It would have been funnier, if he had not been so racist. Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Bill Shooter of Bul) Comments RE[3]: Java ??? http://www.osnews.com/thread?450063 http://www.osnews.com/thread?450063
Yet they developed Google Chrome in...C++...


Webkit was already C++ and there really is not a good alternative high performance language which works on all platforms since Objective-C is restricted to Apple platforms in practice, D is not ready (nor might ever be) and Java is, well, just plain awful for building client side applications. Go is just a toy language at the moment. Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (drahca) Comments RE[4]: Java ??? http://www.osnews.com/thread?450102 http://www.osnews.com/thread?450102
"Yet they developed Google Chrome in...C++...


Webkit was already C++ and there really is not a good alternative high performance language which works on all platforms since Objective-C is restricted to Apple platforms in practice, D is not ready (nor might ever be) and Java is, well, just plain awful for building client side applications. Go is just a toy language at the moment. "

Well it depends what you mean by client side. If you mean GUI's then this is a language agnostic thing. What really makes the difference here is the GUI toolkits (Qt being a particularly good one - which is available for both C++ and Java indirectly).

In terms of languages itself, C++ has inconsistent, ugly and very powerful syntax. Java is much more enjoyable to program in, allbeit slightly less powerful (pointers, memory access etc). Generally I agree with your point except about Java ;)

C++ is good enough and very widespread. There is simply no alternative that is that much better. For embedded C++ is the obvious choice due to its low-level capabilities. For very complex higher-level stuff, Java is a better choice.

P.S. I program daily in C/C++ for embedded things.Edited 2010-11-16 08:39 UTC Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Aragorn992) Comments Comment by Fransexy http://www.osnews.com/thread?450141 http://www.osnews.com/thread?450141 AmigaOS obtained WebP datatype the day after it was announced so the system and any application (that uses datatypes) can "view" webp images

http://freesoftwareando.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/webp3.png Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Fransexy) Comments futile http://www.osnews.com/thread?450203 http://www.osnews.com/thread?450203 Did the Java Cortado applet really help the adoption of Ogg Theora? Wed, 17 Nov 2010 00:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ddennedy) Comments RE[5]: Java ??? http://www.osnews.com/thread?450333 http://www.osnews.com/thread?450333 I develop in Qt and C++ daily. I agree that the C++ language syntax is ugly, but this is for a large part to to its C backwards compatibility. D is nicer, but we'll have to live with C++ and it's quirks for now.

Well it depends what you mean by client side.


Ok, maybe I should have explained myself a bit here. I personally do not like the Swing toolkit and think it looks ugly on every platform. It is lacking in functionality present in other toolkits such as Qt and it's responsiveness is also not great. It also seems to be pretty much abandoned.

QtJambi has been abandoned by Nokia, so that is not really an option anymore.

In terms of languages itself, Java is a pain to program in when you are dealing with things like codecs due to the lack of unsigned datatypes, which is still an incredibly stupid decision. Also there is no way to access the SIMD units of modern CPUs. So any codec written in Pure Java, as Sun liked to call it, is slow as hell compared to the optimized C version. So mostly you are stuck using external C libraries and bind them with JNI. Then of course the fun starts with the Java memory model. Anyway, I would never recommend Java to be used outside the server environment. Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (drahca) Comments RE[6]: Java ??? http://www.osnews.com/thread?450453 http://www.osnews.com/thread?450453
I develop in Qt and C++ daily. I agree that the C++ language syntax is ugly, but this is for a large part to to its C backwards compatibility. D is nicer, but we'll have to live with C++ and it's quirks for now.

"Well it depends what you mean by client side.


Ok, maybe I should have explained myself a bit here. I personally do not like the Swing toolkit and think it looks ugly on every platform. It is lacking in functionality present in other toolkits such as Qt and it's responsiveness is also not great. It also seems to be pretty much abandoned.

QtJambi has been abandoned by Nokia, so that is not really an option anymore.

In terms of languages itself, Java is a pain to program in when you are dealing with things like codecs due to the lack of unsigned datatypes, which is still an incredibly stupid decision. Also there is no way to access the SIMD units of modern CPUs. So any codec written in Pure Java, as Sun liked to call it, is slow as hell compared to the optimized C version. So mostly you are stuck using external C libraries and bind them with JNI. Then of course the fun starts with the Java memory model. Anyway, I would never recommend Java to be used outside the server environment. "

Fair points. I also do not like Swing (SWT is better)! Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Aragorn992) Comments