On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 12:17 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm...@cam.ac.uk> wrote: > Taken at face value this is a very serious problem for Blue Obelisk as many > of us develop in Java. If the world decides "Java is dangerous everywhere" > and Java dies we have a very major problem. I have somewhere approaching a > million lines of code in Java, so does Jmol, CDK, Jchempaint, and a number > of others. We rely heavily on each others libraries. > > .... > The advice from the CERT seemed to be to get rid of Java everywhere and kill > the language. This seems excessive. But we cannot tell all our users (many > of whom are unknown to us) to go through all the java disabling on the CERT > site. > > What do we do? and what do we tell people?
There's nothing to do but watch. Our community is so small that we'll have no influence on whether browsers support Java or not. Oracle's support of Java is perfunctory at best ... just like their support for OpenOffice. They don't have Sun's passion for open source and are just doing enough to look like good citizens, but not enough to keep the projects alive. OpenOffice forked into LibreOffice, which is keeping it alive (and prompting Oracle to do a better job on OpenOffice). Without the strong corporate sponsorship that Sun provided, I doubt Java will continue to move forward. Oracle's lukewarm support just won't cut it. In other words, I suspect the chemical informatics/modelling Java community is at the mercy of forces we can't control, and the outlook is ambiguous. I suspect server-side Java will be around more-or-less forever. It's the browser where Java may disappear. Rich Apodaca advocates a cool solution for the browser problem: Compile Java code into Javascript: http://depth-first.com/articles/2009/01/06/javascript-for-cheminformatics-cross-compiling-java-to-javascript-with-gwt-revisited/ Maybe this is a good solution: real Java for server apps, Java-to-JavaScript for browser applets. Craig ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Blueobelisk-discuss mailing list Blueobelisk-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/blueobelisk-discuss
