On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Brandon W. Beasley wrote:
> I'm a little ticked. Westlaw.com is my online legal
> research tool. I use Linux and Netscape. They are
> revamping there website, but the site will only be
> accessible from a Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT platform using
> the latest IE or Netscape on that platform.
>
> It won't even work on Mac versions of the browsers.
>
> When asked about Netscape for Linux, the tech people dont
> know what you're talking about. If you say unix, then a few
> more neurons start firing. So, when asked why the new site
> won't work with all java-enabled browsers, the idgit on the
> phone says matter-of-factly that "yeah, the mac versions
> don't have all the java features we need" or something like
> that.
>
> Question: I THOT JAVA WAS SPOSE TO BE PLATFORM
> INDEPENDENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AM I MISSING
> SOMETHING?
Sort of - you can write programs to the various versions of the Java
platform available. The main versions, corresponding to JDK releases, are
1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 (now in beta). Anything you have written using the
lower version should run in a later version of the virtual machine, but if
you write something using 1.1 JDK it won't necessarily run in a 1.0
compliant browser. The latest versions of Netscape and IE have support for
1.1 on most machines - except Macintosh, where Netscape only fully
supports 1.0 (although I'm not sure about Netscape 4.7. IE can use JRun, I
think, though so it could do 1.1). So, my guess is that they are writing
Java applets with 1.1 compliance in mind, thus the statement made about
Mac versions. The whole situation can be confusing.
That being said, it does seem silly to me not to have at least one Linux
or Solaris box around just to test with. I wish more sites would. Most of
the time Java applets will work on Unixish machines running Netscape. I
recently went tried out www.financialengines.com, which has a pretty big
applet - the site informed me that my Unix (Solaris) Netscape wasn't
supported, but it did let me proceed anyway, so that is a plus. And things
worked fine.
Bottom line is, the Linux version of Netscape should be just as capable as
the Windows version (bugs aside) of running the applets on any given site.
But alas, the poor Mac users....
Daniel
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