I brought in Java to our multi-company DARPA software project with the first public release, Alpha-something.
1. It was free.
2. Jave code ran unchanged on Sun/Solaris, Windows (95?), and Mac OS.
3. There were GUI components that would sort of look like Motif, Windows, Mac. There was no other multi-platform GUI library that was usable.
4. It had garbage collection. This was a big win.
5. It had the JNI so I could write a Java to C interface layer to the distribution library (COBRA). Later the vendor wrote a 'real' Java interface.
6. It was free, and available for download without budgets, purchase orders, management approvals, and multiple layers of no-sayers.
I had a GUI demo running on a Mac laptop, a Windows box, and a Sun box talking to our servers after one weekend day of programming.
We were not using web browsers or web servers in our system.
1. It was free.
2. Jave code ran unchanged on Sun/Solaris, Windows (95?), and Mac OS.
3. There were GUI components that would sort of look like Motif, Windows, Mac. There was no other multi-platform GUI library that was usable.
4. It had garbage collection. This was a big win.
5. It had the JNI so I could write a Java to C interface layer to the distribution library (COBRA). Later the vendor wrote a 'real' Java interface.
6. It was free, and available for download without budgets, purchase orders, management approvals, and multiple layers of no-sayers.
I had a GUI demo running on a Mac laptop, a Windows box, and a Sun box talking to our servers after one weekend day of programming.
We were not using web browsers or web servers in our system.