John,

>Your contention is that Java is where MS is most vulnerable. I suppose I cannot disagree there. I for one, never got the hype of Java. I never believed the write-once/run anywhere promise. Of any langauge, Fox was closest with x-platform capabilities, and the WO/RA promise didn't hold there.

Whether or not you believe in WO/RA, there are a lot of folks that do it, and will testify to it. I am sure some of the apps are trivial, but I hear tell of a lot of business cases where developers write complex apps in Java (usually server pieces I think) and can have them run on Solaris, Linux, and Windows servers without changing a single line of code.

If you can stand wading through extreme hype, check out some of Sun's developer pages. I am sure they have plenty of examples of real-life Java WO/RA.

>I see/saw Java as something you dabbled in, experimented with, etc. Until it matures, until an app of significance is written using Java, I will be a skeptic. Corel tried, but quickly bailed.
>
>If I could write apps in C++ or VB, why would I move to Java? What is the compelling story there?

It is compelling for folks with vastly heterogenous environments...mixes of AS/400, PCs, and UNIX boxen. Sure if you commit to Windows then it would be silly to invest in Java, especially if you didn't already know it. But for folks that want a solution that can be cross-platform, I don't see why Java wouldn't at least be on the short list of things to try. For example, here we use PCs and an AS/400 backend. If I wanted to write one set of business objects that could run premium/price calculations (crop insurance) on both Windows and OS/400, how would I do it using VB? I know cross-platform stuff isn't going to be easy in any case because of data storage differences, etc, but at least in Java I can write code that runs on both platforms with no changes.

Also, plenty of folks do cross-platform work without using Java. Things like Zoolib, Xerces C++, and Qt provide libs that can create natively compiled code on various platforms with no code changes. Also, tools like Perl, Python, and Tcl/Tk offer cross-platforms solutions if you don't mind shipping a run-time along with your app.

I can see why Java per se isn't necessarily compelling, but surely the quest for cross-platform capability is of great interest to many folks out there.

Sorry to pick out your one comment...I absolutely agreed with everything else, so didn't see much need to copy it...

JoeK