June 5th, 2009
JavaStation Reprise?
A couple of weeks ago I contacted Craig Bender (”Thinguy”) to suggest that he and I work together to put some Sun Ray demonstration projects on the table for the developing Oracle display computing band wagon. He hasn’t responded - but I just got off the phone with a guy who’s pretty plugged in on the other side of this and don’t like the implications of what I heard.
The threat, I think, is that they’ll put a lot of weight behind the Windows java client for Oracle apps - basically resurrecting the ill fated 1990s java station idea without the MAJC hardware to pull it off.
The Java Station originally ran the 110(?)Mhz microsparc in classic thin client mode: download the app, run it locally, upload results. To say that it sucked is to be overly polite: a version of the WordPerfect suite customized for it was so slow it made Windows 95 look good, and the set up was extremely (ahem, cough) “network sensitive” - i.e. network congestion or slowing caused lots of hard to trace client failures.
I know no one at Sun listens, but here’s a heartfelt prayer from a frequent user: kill this idea before it gets up a head of steam and buries the best opportunity that’s come along since NCD for real network computing to succeed in the marketplace.
Paul Murphy (a pseudonym) is an IT consultant specializing in Unix and related technologies. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 06/08/09
