Yet another reason...

[Jules Richardson]

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 21:34 -0500, Scott Stevens wrote:
> On Thu, 5 May 2005 12:31:57 -0400
> "Computer Collector Newsletter" <news at computercollector.com> wrote:
> 
> > ...Why that "ten year rule" no longer applies: Java.
> > 
> > http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/05/05/HNjavaat10_1.html
> > 
> > I can already hear the moans of "hear we go again" but I figured this
> > example is amusing enough... I recall that last time we sort of agreed
> > that date alone is hardly what makes something "vintage".  I still
> > concur.
> > 
> 
> Oh, I dunno.  There's a certain folkloric amusement in collecting
> examples of early Java hype.  It's kinda like looking back at old issues
> of Mondo 2000 magazine.  Was there anything 'java' *except* hype for the
> first few years?  

Well, back in 1996 I was involved in a large client-server Java project
for a company that attempted to drag SSA's business planning / control
software into something resembling modern times...

Their software was all based on AS/400s with users sitting at dumb
terminals at this time; the only way for us to intelligently talk to the
back-end servers was via screen-scraping middleware.

Long story short though, we ended up with about 30k lines of client and
server Java code, plus a million or so lines of autogenerated code to
produce the screen layouts which mimiced the fields that a user of a
dumb terminal would see, with the client-side code all running in a
browser.

It was probably one of the first serious attempts anywhere at server-
side Java, as well as one of the biggest Java apps around, and certainly
proved that the technology worked. (I remember we got early access to
Sun's attempts at a Java NC, and they were bloody awful bits of
equipment)

SSA's big clients were using all sorts of hardware alongside the big
AS/400 systems and terminals, so the fact we could run on anything that
supported a Java VM was a definite bonus.

Of course it was too little too late for SSA; they'd spent the preceding
years just selling the same old stuff whilst competitors like SAP were
moving with the times...

cheers

Jules