🚀 go-pugleaf

"Doug Rickard" <rickard@primus.com.au> wrote in message
news:39e1b447@news.iprimus.com.au...

> Thank you very much for your in depth response. It makes me wonder however
> if Java is appropriate as our upgrade language. If what we consider as a
> simple but integral feature of our applications becomes such a complex
issue
> under Java, we may well be better off staying away from Java completely.

Well, I think Java is wonderful, so I'll take moment to advocate it. I
regret frigtening you off, if that's what Iv'e done.

The complexity is there only because these internationalisation issues were
considered from day one. Those things that become problems later on are
already taken care of, at the price of a small learning-curve increase. If
you need full-on tricky things to do with calendars, then it's not a
separate library you have to load: it's integrated into the APIs. If all you
want to do is convert strings to and from, using the local calendar, then
you call DateFormat.getInstance() to get a class to do it. It has a parse()
and a format(). t doesn't get much simpler than that. Particularly
considering how difficult it can be to make a "simpler" system do exactly
what you need, if the fit is not perfect.

Another issue is text input and output streams - "Writers" as opposed to
"Streams". The complexity is there because java, quietly and without fuss,
will handle greek, crillic, chinese, kanjii etc without these windows "code
page" things. Most of the time it just doesn't matter. You can string
compare two strings, dump them to a file, save them in a database, send them
across the world via a CORBA call and never worry that one of them might be
in thai or telugu.

As for environment variables - there's ongoing discussion as we speak. Yes,
java is still a work in progress. Java has a general config mechanism -
properties in property files. Environment variables are not always relevant
(eg, in EJBs). In windows, they are an anachronism - aren't we supposed to
be using the registry for this kind of thing these days?

That said: if you are writing a windows app to run on windows, Visual Basic
or Visual C++ are still excellent choices. There's an existing skill base,
the tools have fewer bugs, and it's faster. If there are reasons you were
looking at Java, specifically, they are probably still good. However,
learning the APIs and the Java-ish way to accomplish things is a significant
task, and not to be underestimated. You can fool around for hours trying to
break your string into chunks using .substring() and .charAt(), or you can
use a StringTokeniser, which is what it's for. You have to know it's there
first, though.

Or you can hire me <g>.

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