Java on the BSD Desktop?

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 30/05/07, n j <nino80 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I guess if everyone here on this list gives his/her two cents to this
> > topic we're having a nice java advocacy flame war. ;-)
>
> The main characteristic of a flame war is to disparage other people's
> arguments while maintaining that your arguments are the best, no?
> That's why I'm not going to try and talk anyone out of their poison
> :-), be it C, Python, Perl or C#/Mono.

That's the beauty of straddling the pale
'twix open source and "Evil".  Adoption
notwithstanding . . .

> Rather, I would like to continue a constructive discussion by speaking
> from a personal experience. I apologize in advance if this is OT even
> though it is FreeBSD-related and this list does see a lot of
> shell/perl/... questions, so I don't see why a Java question should be
> illegitimate.

Any specific toolkit (recalling that the zeroeth
post was IRT a GUI [wrapper|front-end] to an
extant tool), be it GTK, athena, QT, java, FLTK,
whatever, will naturally exclude those of us who
shudder at the thought of $THAT_GRAPHICAL_THING
but (and given that this is a survey of exactly one
person at a BAC of around 0.110) the broadest
installed base on FreeBSD is probably GTK2.
Java is easily an order of magnitude difficulter
to download, compile, install, and run than almost
anything else.  Again: adoption v. wot-I-fnordin'-want!

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