Did Sun really kept its cross plateform promise with Java? Well, no better person to answer this question than Java's inventor himself, Sun's Fellow, James Gosling (pictured). So?

Just... not quite. On the desktop, Java applications run quite well on Windows and Linux, but not on Mac OS because Apple has been slow to upgrade its Java virtual machine (JVM). On the server, it mostly works. However, the nightmare is really on handsets, with incompatible versions of the JVM that force developers to adapt their Java application for each mobile phone.

But there's hope and it's call the Mobile Service Architecture (MSA) which includes the Java core APIs as well as a set of standard libraries. The idea is that all MSA certified phones will then run MSA applications no problem. That's great... but why did it take so long to figure this out? For Gosling, the handset makers are to blame. True... but for me, Sun was also part of the problem. Anyway. It's the past. The future for mobile Java is now bright!

James Gosling about Java on the iPhone: the technology part is trivial... it'll take a week-end to get it on the iPhone!


Apple is using "secret APIs" for the Mac OS X Java Virtual Machine... Sounds like another Microsoft to me


Google Android is a bag of code with weird APIs... you can't get an Android phone... and what's the business model?


Ruby can't scale and is not reliable... so build your app prototype in Ruby, test it, get some traction and if it's successful... port it quickly to Java!!!!


The Java Virtual Machine can support multiple other languages, on top of Java, including scripting languages like Ruby or Python which run faster on Sun's JVM! But don't expect to run C/C++ on a JVM... for security reasons (think naked pointers!)


The Java VIrtual Machine is probably the most capable of taking advantage of multi-core platforms today... tested with 100 CPUs and 1TB or RAM