Cool, but Java? I saw Ken Perlin at GDC and loved the facedemo. Procedural expressions. Super cool! I would pick this as my number one thing that I would like to do R&D on. I love goofy programming religion issues like the choice of a language and I'm wondering why your inspired by Java from his site. I'm much more interested in doing this stuff in C/C++. Is it just becuase of the web display issue? posted by tonebyteSeptember 2, 2001 at 11:27 [ e ]

Java Sucks!!! Just kidding too. I've never understood the reason for Java on embedded systems like Cell phones. How is it not guaranteed to be slower and worse at memory management? If a nice standard C API for display and communications was available, why wouldn't this be a much better way to do it? I use C/C++ and STL for stuff I do now and really my main reason for C++ and STL over C is just that I can do more with a smaller programming team. I've converted Java code recently and it was pretty easy to do this. I've looked at the Swing toolkit demos. But MFC and ATL still kick butt. And if I build MFC or ATL COM components then any compiled language or scripting language can use them if I include the correct interface. Flash is cool, but I don't want to learn it. I'd rather build the ActiveX control and tools myself and have control over the display technology. Which is actually part of what I'm doing for work these days. That sodaplay site is cool. I hadn't heard of it. Inspiring even... posted by tonebyteSeptember 3, 2001 at 14:32 [ e ]

Java Rules!!! Just kidding. I really have no idea. I've looked at Java for about a total of 30 minutes and I've never gotten anywhere. Unlike Javascript where I can just type some code in a text file and it executes in the browser with Java, like C/C++ I have to compile it first (or if I don't I don't know how to use it) I don't have VJ++ (which has probably been discontinued). I downloaded the big ass Sun IDE but of course getting into a new language that's not a scripting language is a bigger deal. Learning how to link, how to include, how to get libraries, setting a billion options, etc. I just want some piece of code to start with (I should probably get a book). Say Tetris, and then I can modify it. The fact I can use it one the web seems kind of cool. You've seen Sodaplay.com right? But the real reason I want to learn Java is I'm getting convinced it may be important. Although it seems to have died on the desktop all the Japanese phones support it and I keep hearing about other gadgets that are starting to support it so it seems like maybe something good to know. Also, without having learned it, my impression is lots of stuff is done very differently from the way of I done stuff in the past. Lots of threading, lots of objects in a more objecty way than I've used objects before. At least that's how it appears. I also want to learn Flash but I have no real use. I've learned it enough to be a T/A at Digital Hollywood but not enough to do anything really interesting. What I'd really like to do (or buy) is make a game quality flash engine. It might not support all the features of Flash but basically it would let people make stuff in Flash, following certain limits, then you'd run the Flash file through some munger and get something you can use on a PS2 or on a Gamecube etc. This would let you farm out glue screens to other companies or at least give more control to the artists. In a related story, I started learing Windows Scripting Host. If you didn't know. Windows (as of 98 and installable in 95) has a this thing called the scripting host that lets you script in any language that adds support for it. It comes with Visual Basic and JavaScript and you perl and python works with it. What's the point? Well, you can access all of Windows and many programs so for example I was able to make a perl script that parses the e-mail in one of my Outlook folders, extracts names, serial #s and e-mail addresses and then sends form mail to the registered Thumbs users. Photoshop is also controlable from those scripts so you could make a script to process all your graphics through Photoshop for example. I was pretty happy with this book. It's only big problem is it's written before version 5 of WSH (I think it's version 5) which added support for typelibs (the cross language scripting version of includes) so that you can call a function and no longer have to pass a magic #. posted by greggmanSeptember 3, 2001 at 15:22 [ e ]

Embedded Java Well, the things Java gets you for Embedded systems are: Portability. I suppose you could use some kind of intepreter/p-code thingy that used another language but Java's already exists. In my imagination I imaging j-code as interpreted assembly language. It's probably higher level than that but it seems like you could make a C or C++ compiler that spit out j-code. It's already here, people know it. There was already Java on webpages. Now there's Java on phones on webpages. There isn't C++ on webpages (well there's active X but active X would have to be re-compiled for each phone / applicance unless, like above, a new compiler that spit out c-code came out. I guess that's want C# is kind of about. Learing Flash to me is more like learning 3DS Max. Knowing it would help me help artists to make the things they want since I'd know how it works so I could answer questions, demonstrate techniques etc and like I said it would also allow me to write my own runtime for it for games. For other interesting Java try the stuff on this page. Skip the first one though. I'm impressed for 100% portable code. There's also a few on this page but they require OpenGL acceleration. posted by greggmanSeptember 4, 2001 at 18:49 [ e ]