Re: Stories about JAVA-Perfomance Message #7 Posted by Raymond Del Tondo on 13 May 2005, 9:36 p.m., in response to message #6 by Thomas Okken
Full ack!
I'm not a professional Java developer,
but I also have some basic experience with the language
and some tools to create progs, like NetBeans and Eclipse.
A few years ago, when working as a DB developer,
I used the Oracle Enterprise Manager,
which was converted from Oracle Forms to Java
from Version 8.x.x on , to be portable.
Man, that was a drawback in performance!
The EM for Oracle 7.x.x ran fast and well
even on a Pentium I with 166 MHz,
but the Java Enterprise Manager
would not run on machines slower
than 500 MHz and 128MB RAM,
and then still in slow motion.
Ok, PCs are faster now,
but the old EM did the same as the new one,
and it may be questionable to buy a new machine
only to be able to do the same tasks with
adequate performance than before,
only because the app has dramatically slowed down.
Last year we began a Java-based project,
so I learned not only to use Java apps,
but working with the language itself.
Of course there are significant differences
regarding the performance of a Java app,
which can be seen by simply comparing
NetBeans with Eclipse.
Both are free, but I would suggest using Eclipse;-)
To get back to the point performance:
My experience with even very simple Java
apps is that the user interface is VERY slow.
I wrote some simple apps using AWT and Swing,
a container with menu bar and some menu entries,
even with no menu actions associated.
Man, you can *see* the menu scroll down,
and there's always a small delay when
moving from one menu entry to another.
The look and feel of the emulated UI controls
is slower than everything I saw during the last years.
This is understandable as there is always an
additional software layer behind the control
to adapt the Java action to the actual OS,
until the action takes place.
But if you're used to applications which react
instantly then Java UIs are not for you so far;-)
Background:
For developing apps, we used Centura SQLWindows for years,
which also relies on a runtime library,
but the resulting applications ran very
fast even on very slow PCs (166MHz) .
No waiting for key or menu reactions,
regardless how complicated the UI was.
Don't get me wrong, this is no Java bashing,
only my observations.
I was mildly shocked that the Java environment and
the resulting apps ran so much slower on my PC than
my much more complicated UIs made with Centura.
All on the same PC, a ThinkPad X31 with Pentium-M and 1GB RAM.
I'm sure Java has its advantages,
but the performance of user interface controls
doesn't seem to be the strongest point;-)
Raymond
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