Competing On Internet Time by Michael A. Cusumano & David B. Yoffie

Author:Michael A. Cusumano & David B. Yoffie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 2008-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

Optimism and Disappointment with Java

Netscape engineers were highly flexible when it came to choosing programming languages for cross-platform design. In the early projects, for example, Netscape wrote all the cross-platform code in the C programming language. AT&T originally had designed this language to work on its UNIX platform, but C has since become a universal programming language. In addition, many of the basic APIs that the NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator teams used for the early browsers came from the UNIX-C environment. Totic recalled, “Originally, all the cross-platform code was written in C. That was the law because C was the only truly portable language.” In the 3.0 and 4.0 client projects, Netscape developers relied heavily on C++ (an object-oriented version of C) as well as C. But they did nothing distinctive here: These are the same languages Microsoft used to write all the versions of Internet Explorer.

By early 1997, however, Netscape executives and engineers had become very enthusiastic about Java. As a computing language, Java was object-oriented (modular) and inherently cross-platform. If Netscape could write an entire product in Java, it would eliminate many of the productivity penalties that came from designing and testing cross-platform code. Sun Microsystems’s promise with Java was “write once, run everywhere.” This worked because, in most cases, developers do not write Java code to run on the APIs of a particular operating system. Rather, they write in a platform-neutral language called “byte code” and to a platformneutral layer called a “virtual machine” (VM). Internet browsers and some other Internet software include the VM program, which translates or interprets the byte code so that it can run on any operating system. It does not matter whether the machine is a Windows PC, a Macintosh, a UNIX workstation, or a network computer.

The problem with Java is that it has to go through this extra step of being translated or interpreted, so it usually loads and runs more slowly than code written directly for a particular operating system, such as Windows. But Java has other advantages that excited the Netscape engineers. One such advantage was that it helped minimize certain programming errors. Toy pointed out that developers can write good or bad code in any language. Java, however, made it hard for them to break certain useful rules, such as for object abstractions and memory management: “Thinking that a language makes you design better is stupid. You can write really good component software in C and really bad spaghetti code in Java. [But] Java gives you language abstractions that make it hard to break the rules if you decide that these are the rules that we’re going to have. It’s hard to reach through an interface and do bad things.” Rick Schell agreed, particularly with Java’s ability to help programmers manage their allocation of memory resources (an especially difficult problem in native Windows programming):

Shifting to Java is helpful because a lot of the problems that you encounter in software have to do with very simple, stupid stuff.

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