Java is not a hairball – Official

JavaOne Sun brushed aside the 'Put Java On A Diet' by saying that developers want more, not fewer features. And Register readers overwhelmingly agree with Big Mauve.

"It's not a hairball," Pat Sueltz told us. "It's becoming quite handsome."

Rickie Green, Sun's VP of Java Development added:

"It's a very delicate dance you have to do. Developers are asking for more and more features; individuals are saying to us we have not enough in Swing and EJBs and so on. You don't want to create too much bulk and damage the footprint, but the trend in the market has been to more and more services," he said.

And many of you have written to point out that the 40Mb figure quoted by Kelly is misleading.

"Of course it will take more than 9 MB of disk space once the installer decompresses it, but disk space is not really a concern these days," writes Welsey Felter.

"In contrast, the JRE 1.3 download is 5 MB, so 1.4 *has* gotten a lot bigger, but IMO if Sun doesn't bundle various libraries with the JRE, they will simply end up included with every Java application. Would Java developers prefer users to download the same libraries again and again, or to just bite the bullet and download JRE 1.4 *once*, with lots of useful stuff already included?"

Adam Martin makes the same point, and says that even with the developer kit at the size it is, it's still mean. "Compare this 40Mb with the size of the Windows DirectX SDK - over 100Mb last time I looked, and *that* does a hell of a lot less than Java," writes Adam Martin. "So, these people are mostly idiots who probably couldn't find their arse with both hands. "

Ouch.

Sun's Green told us that Sun took pains deciding whether to make features optional or mandatory.®

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