Comment:Java has significantly better client side cross-platform performance than just about anything out there. Server side, I've never not been able to write test and deploy on arbitrary platforms.

reply: "No, no, no...It's logically just the opposite, simply because there is a much wider array of possible environments on the client side. At one time or another, just about every computer ever built, running every OS ever written, with every bizarre Web browser anybody's tried to make work, running an unknown version of the JRE, will try to connect to your Web site and run your Java applet. Conversely, on the server side, people standardize on server environments, and grow by cloning machines in clusters. You get one configuration tricked out in the lab, and write it up as your spec so it's reproducible."

I think we are still not in the same address space here. My point still stands that Java has better client side cross-platform performance than anything out there- you don't really address this. Yes, I am aware of how standard enterprise architectures are built up- but my point there remains. Damn near any OS can run one Sun-Spec serverside engine or another (JBoss, Tomcat, yeadh yaddah), and I have *never* needed to do anything at all to throw my app from one machine/platofrm to another. Thats pretty good. Write something serverside with a C proc on an AMD BSD machine, good luck getting it working on a Wintell Server. I know a good online distributer for coffee for your late night code session....

And as far as Javas architectural advantages being old news, and .NET growing the concepts, I don't see any demonstration at all of that claim. I'm willing to believe, but you need to point to something. One could say that the translation of Legacy code into new a VM based architecture (VMs go alll the way back to the original smalltalk) was an improvement of SUNs spin on the VM idea- but I disagree. The concept was not clearly an evolution, just an expansion. It brings just as many problems as it solved- mainly that now shops are dragging around 40-year-old legacy code, still, that they need specialized knowledge to maintain, and are now tied to windows, and don't have the speed they once had.... Had they migrated to a single-language solution, like Java, however...

IMHO, the pinnacle of OOP was smalltalk, way way back when.

C# is good, but it allows all the pitfalls of C/C++: Not that great of an Object Oriented framework (IE, you can break it easily with bad habits, and just code up C code)- and once you cross over to the system resource level- always tempting with C, you are now married forewver to one architecture. Do that with enough code on a big enough Server Side architecture, and better warm up to your current line of servers- they ARE your business now.

Now, as far as broiken client side Java, in all my years of Java, I have only had 2 versioning cycles of Java break applet code (1.4.2 to 1.5 and some where back in the 1.3 'bad old days')- mainly because *I* had not followed Sun Specs or paid attention to something obvious.

Also, with Java and a little bit of cleverness, my App can compile as an Application, a Web Start, an Applet and with a little work- a server-side app with a thin client.

"If you need a "fat client" on the Web, you have no choice but to write it in JavaScript."

News to me, and my [very] Fat Client old-school JAVA applet (yup! you heard right-Java applet! Webstart will probably be its future, but right now the applet is doing pretty good.), which runs successfully every day to users on Mac, PC and Linux platforms using IE, Mozilla, Netscape, Safari and Firefox (a few people claim to have run it on other browsers, but I don't support them). Basically, if it has a 1.4.2 plugin, it will run. The only caveat is browser settings and firewall settings- but the same applies to everything except vanilla HTML there, and most certainly apples to Javascript (browser settings).

My experience with Javascript, although I am obviously nowhere near your level of 1337-ness with it, is most decidedly not cross-browser and cross platform. You could say quite rightly, that you just really have to know what you are doing to write platform independent javascript- but if you say that, then I will tell you the exact same thing about java. At which point, neither of us have a point.

I will certainly conceed that you have probably forgotten more about javascript than I ever knew. I use it for small things, little tricks.

Now, IMHO, XML has helped to revolutionize a lot of things- but one place it has yet to see its full unfiltered effect is the Client Server model, more specifically, in the GUI realm. Imagine Server Side whatever squirting XML at Serverside whatever</>. Java serverside and Flash plugin clients come to mind. Flash is about the only thing that I have had significant experience with that outperforms Java on cross-platform/cross browser compat. And of course, you can rightly say that Flash is really javascript...

A. Prog.