Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) JBPC in Browser?



At 06:35 PM 5/6/97 -0400, Ken Mandelberg wrote:
>
>Back last November when Ascend announced the JBPC the press release said
>
>>By running inside of a Java-capable browser,
>>the JBPC attains complete cross-platform compatibility with Macintosh,
>>Windows 3.1x, WIN95, Windows NT, and UNIX operating systems. 
>
>When I followed up it Ascend support told me that only the standalone
>windows version was available at that time, and the platform independent
>browser release was in developement.
>
>Its now 6 months later. What happened to the browser based JBPC?

OK, _my_ apologies for not being more proactive about this whole deal. This
has turned out to be an issue that we are still fighting with as described
in this note from our JBPC development group:

>We found, as have other Java developers, that the cross-platform promise of
>Java has yet to be fulfilled (see for example, NetworkWorld, December, 1996:
>"Write Java applets once, run them anywhere? Not!").  This means that we have
>to retest our code with every Java operating environment we try to support. 
>It never works first time, in most cases due to bugs in the Java environment
>itself, or differences in implementation between different environments.  The
>bottom line here is that we can only support a limited number of (most
>popular) environments at the current time -- Java is just not standard enough
>to write once and run everywhere.
>
>Our decision to ship a stand-alone application instead of running inside a
>browser allows us to test our code against the same Java run-time (the one we
>ship with the application) that will be used by our customers.  Again, this
>concession is made necessary because the run-times are so varied.  We have
>tried, and we are currently unable to make a single version that runs under
>both Internet Explorer and Netscape, because of differences in the networking
>APIs.  These differences normally don't affect authors of lightweight applets
>that do little but drive the screen, but they kill us.  The decision to run
>stand-alone has little or no negative impact on the operation of the
>application; it looks just the same inside a browser window as it does in a
>stand-alone application, except there is no browser frame around the outside
>of the Window.
>
>Lynn

Kevin Smith                              Updated Service and Support
Ascend Communications                    Resources are now at:
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