[MUD-Dev] Re: Wild idea.. :)

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Adam J. Thornton wrote:

[skipped]

> I decided against Java for my stuff, which was hard, since Java has great
> networking and threading support out of the box.

You forgot to mention other beautiful stuff, such as (off the top of my
head, and I'm talking about JDK 1.2b4):

- serialization (which, though, can be considered a part of networking)
- SQL support
- security support (may not be that useful for MUDs, but great for other
networked stuff, as well as for the Q&A - I'm talking about 1.2 security
model)

> Java is A) slow.  This probably won't be a problem in a couple
> years.

Both true. And, the difference between JDK 1.1 and 1.2 (beta4, in
particular) is just breathtaking.

>  B) it keeps changing.

So what?

> This is the most important, as far as I am
> concerned.  Until it settles down, I don't want to write any code for it,
> knowing that I may have to change it in six months or a year.

The solution which worked for me since JDK 1.02 is the architecture
wrappers. I don't want to create the impression that I didn't have to
modify any code at all, but well, that was quite reasonable (well, on
the second thought, I'm going to contradict myself :-):

- 1.02 to 1.1: Thread.stop() to Thread.interrupt() and
DataInputStream.readLine() to BufferedReader.readLine(), on the lowest
possible level. I do not explicitly handle the thread control actions
and events with java.lang.Thread method calls. Also, added 'throws
Throwable' to finalize(). I don't remember any other *significant*
changes.

- 1.1 to 1.2: nothing significant I can remember of. Thanks God, I
didn't get deep enough into the security stuff.

As a bottomline:

When I first read the Java White Paper in 1995, I stared at the ceiling
for a while and then swore with passion. Just because Java contained
about 80% of the code I've been working on for about 5 years (like no
pointers, collections, multithreading) in its core.

And I still keep swearing once in a while - last time just now, because
in order to be exact I had to consult the manuals and find out that
they're actually very close to support the MIME, which I've already done
to some extent, the previous thing I can remember at the moment is SMTP
support (JavaMail).

But, on the bright side, Okay, I need something and create possibly
imperfect implementation, and it works for me for a while, and they do
it later, when I already know how to deal with it (admit that the
implementation of similar things will have similar interfaces), and as a
result my code becomes lighter and more stable.

> Adam

--
Still alive and smile stays on,
Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
--
UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are