@Bob the biggest issue with user education I've seen so far is that people go around screaming "Java is insecure! Java is insecure! Uninstall Java! Uninstall Java!" without understanding that there is an infinitely massive difference between Applets and WebStart/desktop/server uses of Java
probably 33% of the web runs on Java application servers, and the number of security issues you find there which are the fault of the platform rather than the fault of the web/front-end developer is not significantly more/less than other web platforms
just because Oracle failed to make a sandboxed browser plugin (which is extremely hard; look up the number of security vulnerabilities that exist / have existed for Flash, Silverlight, Acrobat plugin, Office plugin, etc) doesn't mean their entire platform is bad
the biggest pieces that were left out of OpenJDK (and thus had to be reimplemented clean-room style, which AFAIK is mostly done barring patent issues on codecs and such) were related to crypto and media, two big dicey areas for patents and third party licensing
There's very specific recommendations saying to run Eclipse with Oracle Java, because its performance apparently sucks even more (how is that possible?! it's going to wrap around at this rate!) under OpenJDK.
so where's the performance metrics showing OpenJDK slower than Java, based on the same build number? (e.g. OpenJDK 7 build 45 vs. Oracle Java 7 build 45; comparing different builds isn't fair)
not sure if it's your hardware or your drivers or what, but I can't recall ever having any particularly egregious performance problems with Eclipse, even back to Eclipse 2.x on my main desktop with like 4 GB of RAM and a Core 2 at the time
The standard cure for fixing Java problems with Linux distributions like Ubuntu is to say "Use the Sun JDK instead of OpenJDK". For several reasons I'd like to just use the Java shipping with Ubuntu instead of having to install and download from partner repositories or download tarballs.
I have...
@Bob it may seem hard to comprehend why, but Oracle themselves have actually been working hard to make more of OpenJDK better and open source and bring its feature and performance parity up to their binary release, to the point that they're virtually equivalent except for branding
one of the nice side effects is that Red Hat can ship a modern, efficient OpenJDK build in RHEL7, which then rolls into Oracle Linux based on the Red Hat SRPMs
the two companies actually have a significant overlap of shared interest in that space, of running Java server-side on RHEL's platform
for one thing, the javac compiler can target an older runtime, and you can just use APIs in your code that were available as of the older version for backwards compatibility
@Bob unless what you're doing in your code pertains to something weird like custom crypto drivers, native code, OpenCL, etc., the chances of any two Java runtimes which both pass the TCK behaving semantically different on the same APIs is vanishingly small (except for Applets of course)
There's also known issues when .NET 4.5 silently replaced some core parts of .NET 4 with slightly different behaviour. That caused some fun bugs (they're on SO somewhere)
The standard cure for fixing Java problems with Linux distributions like Ubuntu is to say "Use the Sun JDK instead of OpenJDK". For several reasons I'd like to just use the Java shipping with Ubuntu instead of having to install and download from partner repositories or download tarballs.
I have...
