Annoyingly, I had this journal entry all done and then decided to visit a web site, which launched a Java Applet, which crashed my Mac. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to save what I had spent a half hour writing, which was a short bit on what I want to get next to upgrade my PowerBook.

There are a few problems with Apple's Java implementation on the MacOS. Netscape's is even worse, as their browsers use their own internal JVM which is not kept well upkept in the MacOS version of Navigator. Internet Explorer at least uses Apple's MRJ , but I try to stay away from Microsoft products.

Anyway, MRJ has gotten faster in the last couple of versions. In certain applications, it is as fast as on Windows NT. Mostly in graphics-oriented programs. But for processing, MRJ still lacks behind Sun's JDK on Windows NT Workstation. The software I'm helping develop works mostly on the backend, so it runs an order of magnitude slower on my PowerBook than on my Workstation.

But that is still fine. For random testing I can accept the slow down. Having everything run as an Applet is quite annoying. MRJ only comes with an AppletRunner, so to test programs I have to build an Applet that starts the program. Kind of annoying, but surprisingly easy to do with CodeWarrior Pro 5, which has a simple Java GUI builder for making Applets.

I'd like to be able to just compile a program and run it from kind of command line interface, or barring that, running it from a simple console window that emulates a command line interface. It's so much easier to write a small Java program and run it from a command line than to write a small Java applet and run it from AppletRunner. GUI and HTML file is extra overhead that I don't want to deal with.

The current problem I'm having now is that our program triggers a Java security exception when I try to run it under AppletRunner. I haven't been able to find a way to get an Applet to run with all privileges. I should look around the MRJ website or the mailing lists to see if I can find out what I'm doing wrong. It's just a lot of trouble to go sometimes to get my unsupported development environment to work.

My hope is that MacOS X will have a better Java implementation. Something that I can use as an easy development environment. Apache support will be nice too, since we're also doing servlet development and prototyping using Apache's Jserv module, until our Application Server gets servlet support in the next version.

MacOS X should be quite cool. The underlying BSD architecture means that it will be easy to port Unix programs to MacOS X. Not a great concern for most users, but my company primarily develops for Solaris and Windows NT. Hopefully the other groups will port their stuff to MacOS X and I'll be able to use more of our standard tools and environment from my Macintosh.