[NTLUG:Discuss] Transport tool - opinions

[Stephen Davidson]

Ummm, Harshal,

not to deflate your sails to badly, but that is what M$ would like you to believe.  Visa Credit Card Processing, and American Airlines Reservations (for two of the large clusters that I can think of 
off the top of my head) are built on and operate using the Java platform.  I am not sure what AA uses for their OS, but Visa does use Unix (Solaris, I think, but don't quote me, it could be BSD). 
Ishould probably comment at this point that your statement was correct for Java 1.0 & 1.1.  Java 1.2 had a serious speed and usability improvement, as well as Java 1.3 with the general introduction of 
the JIT (actually available on some JVMs, including IBMs, in 1.2).  Java 1.4, one of the main issues addressed was speed, via a number of techniques.

And for stability, if Visa's primary Credit Card Processing Transaction Center is not mission critical enough for you, I am not sure what would be.  Both Visa and AA use Java (in both cases, actually 
Weblogic and their JRockit JVM) to process all of their transactions.  They have been doing this for quite a few years now.

There are also Military Grade Realtime JVMs available, which are now used to handle the Fly-By-Wire systems in some modern jets.  And many of your phone calls, especially your Cell phones calls, are 
handled with equipment running Java (just limiting myself to what I know about directly, or from immediate colleagues, who have worked on stuff besides Application Servers).

When in DEVELOPMENT MODE, which translates to running non-optimized translated byte codes, yes, Java is most definately not the fastest thing around.  With the latest JDK (1.4), with optimized 
precompiled code, Java is today running at speeds comparable to average written C.  Once the RunTime Profiler has had a chance to kick in, Java code runs as fast as well written C code (sometimes 
faster, but that is in special cases where writing object-oriented code is actually a better solution: example would be for BioSystem Modeling).  And when it comes to the Visual C/C++ code, Java kicks.

If necessary, I will go out and chase down some current links for some of the studies I have seen recently.

The attached link is a few years old, and compares various C implementations against Sun's JDK 1.3 and IBM's HotSpot Java.
http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?article_id=153

This made quite a few Java Headlines when it came out, as it was not thought Java Speed was so far along when the comparison was done.  One conclusion drawn would not surprise anybody on this list, M$ 
sucks!  But what was surprising (to me and my immediate coworkers, anyways), was how badly M$ faired in this test.

Sorry, but I could not let this pass.

Regards,
Steve

Vaidya, Harshal (Cognizant) wrote:
> Hi Stephen/Greg,
> 
>    Java dosen't deliver mission critical performance. It is okay for Web Based applications. But when you are talking about parallel computing over several machines, forget Java. Thats the only thing I can say.
> 
> Harshal
> 
>    
> 

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