Re: tlug: Null plugins for Netscape?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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>>>>> "me" == Stephen J Turnbull <turnbull@example.com> writes:

    me> BTW, speaking of the JDK, HotJava-1.0 for Linux is now on sale
    me> (at Linux prices :-) at www.blackdown.org.  Slow and strange,
    me> though, at least when displaying an X window remotely.

And huge, and dangerous.  43MB VmSize (ie, in core!), and crashed my
system (for reasons unknown).  It does do Japanese with a little bit
of fudging, though :-)  In HotJava1.0/runtime/lib, substitute
font.properties.ja for font.properties.  I also substituted wildcards
("*") for the foundry (eg, "morisawa"), family (eg "ryumin light kl")
and serif ("sans") entries in the XLFDs given in that file.  I don't
know if that's necessary, and the font selection ended up being very
ugly (XFree86 will rescale the first bitmap font it finds).  Don't
think it's worth tuning it until I have a machine with 128MB RAM,
though.  This is not going to be my browser of choice for a while.
Haven't checked on how to get nihongo in buttons or input yet.

It does have some nice interface aspects.  For example, when
traversing an imagemap, it creates a bezel to make a clickable region
look a little like a button (although come to think of it, that may be
an applet; it was part of the HotJava does).  I also like the
implementation of the history list (evidently a patent application is
pending :-( ).

On the other hand, evidently it does not do double buffering or
partial updates on the page, so every time more of a large file gets
read and parsed the whole screen gets repainted and jumps around;
sometimes the window gets remapped, and this confuses fvwm which then
reparents again, but the second time puts the HotJava window at (0,0),
and fvwm's title bar is off-screen.  This also happens in jdk-1.1.1
(v1 and v3) appletviewer, so it's evidently something in the way the
Mosaic peer is implemented in Java AWT.

Ah, well.  This does make me wonder whether Java is really ready for
prime time at the user level; a single application that takes up 43MB
of core (and makes substantial demands on X resources like windows,
besides) implies a vast expansion in the resources required.  Does
anybody know just how hungry Java is for system resources?

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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