Microsoft documents in Iowa court case document Microsoft’s original plans to kill Java

This was discussed in the Gossip section on JavaPosse’s podcast number 103, but unfortunately it looks like the website for the links they referred to has been taken down and/or password protected.

The guys in the podcast quoted from the documents that were publicly avaialable on the site, which gave an insight into Microsoft’s original goals to build a competitor to Java (J++?) that would beat Java at it’s own game by ignoring the cross-platform benefits and leveraging native platform support on Windows. J++ never caught on but may have been one stepping stone towards the development of .NET, which again borrows Java concepts (the Common Language Runtime = the Java Virtual Machine), but yet again, still has not made significant impact in the IT industry.

PS3 to launch in Europe minus hardware backward compatibility for PS2

The PS3 units sold in Japan and the US since November ’06 until present have reportedly included the PS2’s chipset to provide near 100% backward compatibility (a few rendering issues needed firmware updates but were fixed). When the PS3 launches in Europe in March, according to news articles this week, the PS3 will not include the PS2’s hardware but will instead emulate the PS2 in software. This is a smart move for Sony as a first step in reducing manufacturing costs, but of course people are worried that this means backwards compatibility will have less that 100% support compared with the original Japan and US consoles.

The future of Java: deprecate or remove features?

Ted Neward recently interviewed Bill Venners, president of Artima, on the subject of the future of the Java language. One of the main discussion points was whether language features should be deprecated, or completely removed in future releases. This has become a hotly debated topic recently, especially since the JDK download is continuing to grow with every new release.

Check out the discussion summary here.

Overview of desktop improvements in Java SE 6

Java SE 6 has introduced a large number of desktop improvements including features to improve the look n feel and integration with the native platform when running on particular OS’es (System Tray integration, text anti-aliasing, native look n feel).

Check out part one and part two of this article for a detailed look at these improvements.