News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.
	Micro-Java-Soft

By Wesley Felter, wesf@mail.utexas.edu.

In the "I hate to say this, but" department, Microsoft has released the first beta of their Java SDK 2.0. It supports the important Java 1.1 specification and includes the much-hailed AFC class library. As expected, it includes more Win32-specific features that don't work on other platforms.

One notable new feature is that you can now write Windows NT services in Java. A service is an application that runs in the background whenever the computer is running, much like daemons under UNIX. It looks like it might take the better part of an hour to convert a standard Java application to run as an NT service.

http://www.microsoft.com/java/

An important but often overlooked aspect of the open-standards world of the Internet is that it's based on protcols and standards that are valued for their simplicity. It doesn't take genius to create the boatloads of Internet software that Microsoft keeps producing. All it takes is a lot of programmers, which Microsoft has. Microsoft's latest software doesn't attempt to innovate much; but it attempts and usually succeeds at being the first solution and the most complete solution.

The innovation that Apple has brought to computing is certainly valuable, but what we need now is software that ships on time and works as advertised. It's too bad that Microsoft seems to be one of the few companies with enough resources to do it.