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So Alive

Posted by editor on November 18, 2008 at 8:05 AM PST

Hard numbers on the Java runtime install base

Since last week, we've been keeping an eye on the thread Tracking Java Versions using Google Analytics, in which Gili Tzabari (cowwoc) linked to a blog he wrote showing how Google Analytics could be used to detect whether website visitors had Java installed and, where possible, which version. "I would love to see Google integrate this as a standard feature of Google Analytics but in the meantime we can do it ourselves. If you own a popular website please share your statistics with everyone else. I'd love to find out what Java usage is like in the wild."

A number of people have checked in with their results, and in today's post, Gili tallies up the results he's seen: 

	1.6.0_00 to 1.6.0_09: 530 (52.89%)
	none: 300 (29.94%)
	1.5.0: 93 (9.28%)
	1.6.0_10: 38 (3.79%)
	1.4.2: 39 (3.89%)
	1.8.0: 2 (0.2%)

	1.4.2+: 700 (69.86%)
	1.5+: 661 (65.97%)
	1.6+: 568 (56.67%)

He goes on to offer some analysis of the results:

So it seems fair to say that ~70% of web users have Java installed, but for those of us interested in Applets or Desktop Applications I guess we are only interested in the top 56% or even 4%...

Is that good enough? I guess it depends on whether you see the glass half-full of or half-empty. I am actually quite surprised that 56% of web users have Java 1.6 installed. That's actually much better than I expected!

Draw your own conclusions from the results, or better yet, grind some data of your own. Complete instructions are provided in the Gili's original blog, linked above and from the first message in the thread.

Also in today's Forums, kirillcool talks about text rasterizing in the followup Re: Text anti-aliasing settings/Changing LAF. "In my opinion, the whole thing about exposing API to set the text rasterization hints is unnecessary. Java2D should use the native rasterizer on *all* platforms for all text rasterization APIs. This is partially done in 6u10 on Windows when the awt.font.desktophints property is used as mentioned in the original links. Hopefully, JDK 7 will remove the bundled rasterizer(s), deprecate the existing rendering hints (in addition to the desktop property) and make them no-ops and start using native text rasterization exclusively based on the current settings of the user desktop environment."

drichan wants you to help make the case for Java Web Start as Rich Internet Application technology. "I work for a large company that has created a web start application that is now being used by thousands of users. The application uses web start for deployment but has all business logic on the server using web services. Our marketing group wanted to know how to define our application, and I told them they should use the term Rich Internet Application. Because that is, in my belief exactly what it is. There are some in the company that don't believe in Java on the Client technology and therefore are pitching hard that this technology not be considered RIA, even though they are willing to call flash, flex, air, and silverlight RIA. How does the Java Desktop community come down on this question. I think it is important because much of Java on the Desktop issues really come down to marketing not technology."

The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobility Podcast 61: Funambol . Funambol provides mobile sync and push email solutions powered by open source. Stefano Muffuli from Funambol talkes with Terrence Barr about the technology and license. by Daniel H. Steinberg

In Java Today, the OpenJDK project's announcement list has announced the approval of two new sub-projects. The Locale Enhancement project, sponsored by OpenJDK's internationalization group, will "enhance the java.util.Locale class in order to bring the Java platform into conformance with IETF BCP47 and UTR35(CLDR/LDML)." Meanwhile, the SCTP project, sponsored by OpenJDK's networking group, will "develop an API for the Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP) and a corresponding OpenJDK prototype."

The Aquarium passes on the news about a November 20th webinar on Seam Framework and GlassFish Server, at 11 AM PST. "The bulk of the webinar will be a presentation by Dan Allen, the author of Manning's Seam in Action and of the Mojave Linux blog. I am trying to include at least one demo and perhaps also an informal discussion on WebBeans and its companion specs (EJB 3.1 and JSF 2.0)."

Jean Francois Poilpret has posted slides from his Javoxx 08 presentation on JSR 296, the Swing Application Framework. Topics covered include the application lifecycle, resource handling and internationalization, actions and tasks, persisting session state, and more.

In today's Weblogs Eamonn McManus has some help for Getting rid of that pesky MalformedObjectNameException. "You can't construct a JMX ObjectName without handling MalformedObjectNameException, which is a checked exception. Here's why that is a pain, how to relieve that pain, and what we're doing to make it less painful in the next version. "

Arun Gupta shares photos and slides from another traveling presentation in GlassFish @ JavaMUG - Trip Report. "Presented on GlassFish at Java MUG last week. The event is hosted at Sun's North Dallas Office. It was impressive to know that local Sun team is hosting 4 User Groups (MySQL, Solaris, and OpenSolaris other than the JUG) in a month."

Finally, Greg Brown looks at Building Rich Internet Applications Using Pivot and JavaScript. "Pivot now allows developers to write their application logic using their scripting language of choice, using the features provided by the javax.script package available in Java 6 and above."

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Hard numbers on the Java runtime install base
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Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

Submitted by mrmorris on Tue, 2008-11-18 19:00.
> Draw your own conclusions from the results, or better yet, grind some data of your own. Oh I did. A couple of month ago, tried to investigate the sad state of client Java in the browser: http://coffeecokeandcode.blogspot.com/2008/08/myth-java-widely-used-on-w...

Submitted by jwenting on Wed, 2008-11-19 11:09.
those conclusions are meaningless. So only some 70% of people website have a JVM installed? I'd call that surprising. Surprisingly low... Low especially given that almost all prebuilt computers come with a JVM installed, usually a current one at the time the machine was built. Unless the results are biassed towards a low penetration by the website attracting mainly Linux users (who as is generally known "hate Java" almost as much as they "hate Microsoft") or some other fluke, it indicates a lot of people either using very old computers or homebuilts with no Java installed. And that's a disturbing trend that shows the ultimate failure of all Sun's efforts to get Java onto every desktop.




 

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