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	Rex Ballard
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.


On Wed, 7 Jun 1995, David M. Oliver wrote:

> 
> Rex,
> 
> 	snipped this little thing from a message that you wrote to 
> 	online-newspapers...
> 
> > Date: Wed, 7 Jun 1995 02:05:16 -0400 (EDT)
> > From: Rex Ballard 
> 
> > Hotjava is just a "web-interfaced ultra-user-friendly" version of some of 
> > the other multimedia capabilities of Andrew/EZ.  A bit more "secure" 
> > perhaps.
> 
> 	First you seem pretty hot for "Andrew".  Am I wrong or is this the
> 	stuff from CMU?  What's "EZ"?  If it *is* CMU, I have not heard of
> 	EZ.   Can you give me a mini-dump on this?

EZ is the mulimedia editor that was written using the andrew toolkit.  There
is a contributed source at tsx-11.mit.edu and also on most of the linux 
distributions.

> 	I *do* however, know quite a bit about Java (formerly called "Oak")
> 	as we evaluated it here.  Perhaps you could quickly compare?

Java is an object oriented language that provides many of the mulimedia
capabilities.  It is also a good demonstration of the CORBA object broker
concept.  Unforutnately, object broker clients must have integral 
knowledge of every type of object and methods for operating on those 
objects.  Without careful management, you quickly end up with a memory 
gobbling pig.  A better approage is to have seperate server processes
that can present the various objects.

> 	I, personally, like the idea of Java.  I saw James Gosling (the
> 	"brains") talk about it last summer and the parallel with Display
> 	Postscript (also his "baby") was amazing.  One could tell the 
> 	bullet-holes he took from the security concerns about Display Postscrpt
> 	were still open wounds.  But, this whole "downloaded functionality"
> 	is a pretty neat idea (I am not too anal about the whole security 
> 	thing).

Unfortunately security is becoming very critical.  The Web browser gave that
cozy feeling of security that was essential to serving Business information
over the web.

> 	Couple things I'm not clear about with Java:

> 	1. OK, a scripting language.  Why not Tcl/Tk/[incr Tcl]?  I am 
> 	a BIG fan of those.  (OK, java has a "secure" byte code).  Tcl/Tk
> 	has both display + UI features, and there are links to other 
> 	languages (including Perl, I think).

Tcl/Tk are not (yet) available on Microsoft Windows Platforms (please
tell me I'm wrong and where to get them).   Security can be added in as a
trivial hack anywhere.  It has been amazing that so many vendors can turn
a system that reflects 5 million man-hours into a proproprietary product
worth $30,000-$90,000 just by adding a trivial RSA hook.  If software patents
were available in the 1980's I would be holding about 30 of them.

> 	2. It's Sun-only.  Wonder way Sun says "we are looking for 
> 	INDIVIDUALS (not companies) to help port Java"???

It's much easeir to hire/sue/buy-off a small individual than it is to deal
with a larger company.  Traditionally, volunteers have contributed source and
porting effort to support proposed standards.  If Sun is planning to release
java as a GPL product, I would be interested in contributing myself.

> Anyway, I hope you can give me some infromation about Andrew / EZ.

Check out the linux archives, the Linux CD (Plug-n-play, Slackware, Red Hat)
Also check out the X11R5 or X11R6 distributions.

> thanks,
> 
> + ------------------------------------------------------------------------- +
> | Dave Oliver | Newshare Corp. Managing Dir. Technology | dave@newshare.com |
> + ------------------------------------------------------------------------- +

Rex Ballard


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Fri Jun 23 19:00:30 1995
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