Arno# - The cutting edge of developer waffle

Having recently started a new job that is Java & ActionScript-centred (as opposed to my old .NET & ActionScript-centred job), I’ve been trying to catch up with the world of Java. Last time I used the latter was back around the turn of the century when Sun hit upon the cunning plan of calling a release both Java 1.2 and Java 2 (a mind-numbingly stupid idea that still continues today with Java 6/ Java 1.6). Things have moved on, the language has had many new features added and the core classes have mushroomed into a huge complex mess that involves a large download. This is of course much the same as .NET, which tends to follow in Java’s footsteps on many levels.

Recently I came across something that Java is soon to offer that .NET would really benefit from: Java 6 SE Update 10. This rather cumbersomely entitled release has the somewhat more snappy title of “Consumer JRE”. This new consumer runtime has a bunch of really nice features, the two key ones in my view are the Java Kernel and draggable applets.

Java Kernel
Like .NET, the Java runtime is a huge download. The first time you try and run a java application on a machine that doesn’t have the JRE installed, in must be downloaded. The Java Kernel is a clever - and oh-so-simple - idea: break the JRE up into lots of bits and only download what is needed. So the first time you run a Java application, the basic - small - kernel is fetched, plus any other parts that the application needs. At that point the application can run. The rest of the JRE is then downloaded in slow-time in the background.

The graph below (from http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javase/consumerjre/) highlights this:

Comparison of Various Swing Application Download Sizes With the Full JRE.

Draggable Applets
Back in the days before Flash, Java Applets were the way to do programatically complex stuff in web pages. In recent years, they have declined in popularity, but this feature may bring them back into favour. If you visit a web page and see an applet that you like, then you’ll be able to drag it out of the browser window to the desktop. It then runs as a fully fledged desktop application, rather than just a browser applet.

When these features will be released is anyone’s guess (early betas of the Consumer JRE were “hot news” last year [2007] and it is still in beta), but they are great features none the less. And so this brings me to .NET 4. When Silverlight 2 is released (I’m still predicting late July or very early August for this release, ie just in time for the Olympics), Microsoft will have an obvious starting point for the equivalent of both of these features. The Mono team have their Moonlight desklets, which Microsoft could take and turn into Silverlight applications that can be dragged out of the browser onto the desktop. And the cut-down .NET framework that forms the kernel of Silverlight 2 would make a great starting point for a piecemeal downloadable .NET 4 kernel.

The “big chief” of .NET - Scott Guthrie - is a man who is happy to take great ideas from anywhere and shamelessly add them to .NET, so I fully hope and expect to see such features in the .NET realm sometime soon(ish).