Guest post by OpenJDK had been released as GA for OS/2 and eComStaion. This allows eCS-OS2 users to run modern Java apps on their platform. The development is open source and had been in part sponsored by donations of the community.
OpenJDK had been released as GA for OS/2 and eComStaion. This allows eCS-OS2 users to run modern Java apps on their platform. The development is open source and had been in part sponsored by donations of the community.
I still think that eComStation is ridiculously overpriced[1] to encourage adoption by anyone other than legacy OS/2 users. Still, I’m pleased to see this release of OpenJDK for the platform, particularly since sponsered by donations: if the community can do that, maybe there’s long-term hope for eComStation after all.
[1] http://www.osnews.com/permalink?474317
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 In terms of their offical suppliers, information also appears to be outdated (I know you can download verson 2 but some of us still have a penchant for the physcial, and for the UK at least you only get pricing info on V1.2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.
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
there are still a few programs I use that are built on java, so it’s nice to know I will be able to use them on me Ecom laptop.
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.
I would visit the forums on http://www.os2world.net. All your questions are answered there.
Years ago, java desktop apps looked ugly and slow on a Windows desktop. Ever since, I’ve pretty much avoided anything I knew was written in Java.
What are things like nowadays? Does any of you actually have some Java apps they can’t live without?
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.
Well, keep in mind that by default, Java limits itself to 256Mb of heap space. If you find that an app is sluggish and seems to do a lot of garbage collection, you can increase the amount of heap space that the JVM is allowed to use. Allowing it to use 512Mb is often suggested for complex apps like IDEs. You can set that with the -Xmx option.
It’s very possibly what I mentioned above. Even if you have 4GB or more of RAM in your system. the JVM by default will not use more than 256Mb unless you tell it that it is OK.
Garbage collection usually doesn’t cause slowdowns in most desktop applications because Java tries to do it as an idle task when the application isn’t doing much of anything else. And of of course, desktop applications spend a lot of idle time waiting for the user to do something.
Sure. but again, Kdevelop doesn’t have nearly the power or features that Eclipse does. I prefer IDEA myself, so I’m not that familiar with Eclipse settings. But you can reduce memory usage by disabling unneeded modules in Eclipse. For example, if you don’t do Enterprise Web development, you can disable the EE modules. If you don’t need SQL database support, you can disable the SQL support modules. You can also disable version control modules for version control systems you aren’t using, and so on.
Having to fiddle with command line parameters to get acceptable performance is not the hallmark of good software. It should just work.
Uh. It’s kind of designed to prevent Java from being able to consume all of the RAM in your system… You know, kind of like Firefox sometimes does because there’s no way to set the maximum amount of RAM that Firefox can use in a way that can actually be enforced.
You are just reaching for straws now to try to maintain your “Java sucks” argument.
No, I really do think software shouldn’t require you to add parameters to get acceptable performance. That’s not really a straw, IMHO but a basic fundamental truth. Firefox had a memory leak. Having a preset limit of memory available would have mitigated the memory leak, but is not a solution to it.
I do understand however that it is a matter of opinion on how to deal with the issue. I think a lot of things in Java sounded like a good idea at the time, and were good responses to the problems developers faced with applications written in other languages on various platforms of the day. The memory limit is sort of annoying, IMHO but not a show stopper. For the most part Java is great, everywhere!*
*Except any use which involves a desktop app with a gui, in my experience.
Haskell, Go, .Net, Ada, C++ and many others do have environment variables to change runtime behaviour.
I don’t have much experience with Haskell, Go, or .Net on the desktop, so I can’t say weather or not its necessary to use them for decent performance of a gui.
C/C++ is what most desktop programs I use are written it. I’ve never really ever had to manipulate the command line parameters for a C/C++ program because the gui was lagging.
I have used python +qt apps, no problems there either.
Objective C: no problems.
Visual Basic (v6): I think the single threaded nature of most of the apps was the real downfall rather than the GUI itself. IN any case they didn’t provide you with a command line option that made anything better. Is Java better for the end user ( again for gui responsiveness)? Tough choice. I’d have to punt and say its been a while since I’ve used vb6 apps and Never on modern hardware.
Some of the problems with sluggish GUIs in Java are because of bad programming. For example, developers doing long running tasks like establishing a network connection on the event dispatch thread. If you perform a blocking operation on the event dispatch thread, you will hang the GUI until the operation returns. The correct way to handle this in Java, of course, is to perform potentially time consuming operations in worker threads so that the GUI doesn’t become sluggish. But I’ve run across a lot of software that doesn’t do that.
Normally you should not have to add parameters because the developer should have figured this out already and configured it for you.
Yes, ether that or eclipse should be written to require less than 250 and/or have a graceful way of requesting more memory if truly needed.
I’m not sure if its really the memory limit causing the app to perform badly, or the gui just performs badly regardless of the memory. I don’t really have time to benchmark it out scientifically. Its just my experience that Java Desktop programs stink.
Perhaps the way Java handles memory limits makes sense on the server but I have never understood it in a client environment.
To my mind, a more sensible default would be to take everything but 256MB (or some other number). Maybe tanking up to 80% of RAM (or some other number) would be better. You could still make these numbers tunable but at least they would not starve user apps of resources just because the users are not Java experts.
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.
OpenOffice has Java dependencies (which is one reason why it’s on OSes like Haiku).
Better late than ever. Java 7 will launch on July 7 🙂
Seriously, this was needed for the corporate market, assuming there’s still some corporation that uses OS/2 _and_ needs Java on it.
I would love to have it on Haiku. I tried to look into it myself, but I don’t have enough time.