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peter murray-rust wrote:

> The real problem is that we need to provide 1 million lines of Java code 
> to the "client". We have these million lines - CML is not a toy. What we 
> do not have is a stable environment to put them in. We cannot rely on 
> the browsers to provide the environment. (Interestingly we had a 
> complete working solution in 1995 on all platforms (UNIX, Windows, MAC) 
> and all browsers (Mosaic, lynx) and it worked. Installation was trivial 
> (it used chemical/MIME, helper applications, and .mailrc files). It has 
> tragically been downhill since then).
> 

Have you checked lately? Based on what you've said in other posts, I no 
longer believe there's a problem to be solved here. There was for a 
while but this hasn't been true for at least two years. In 2006, Java 
1.4 apps can be easily distributed and run on  all major desktop 
platforms. If you needed an applet, then there might be some issues; but 
you don't.

There are numerous existence proofs that one can develop and distribute 
client software written in Java across multiple platforms: LimeWire, 
NetBeans, Eclipse, RSSOwl, Azureus, XQuisitor, etc. You're absolutely 
right that you "cannot rely on the browsers to provide the environment"; 
but why would you even try to do that? I can see nothing in your use 
case that requires a browser-hosted app.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@m...
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/

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