Ethan Nicholas's Blog

Welcome to the Deployment team: My first week at Sun

I mentioned in my last entry that I have left Yahoo! and am now officially a Sun employee. After an all-too-short break between jobs, my first day with Sun was this past Monday, and it's been quite an experience so far.

As with joining any big company, most of my first week was spent trying to get someone to actually set up my access badge and email account, figuring out how to access documentation on various subjects (there is documentation, right?), and dealing with various other miscellaneous getting-started headaches. Most of that is sorted out now and I expect that I should actually be able to, you know, work starting next week.

The most exciting part so far has been the fact that I've gotten to be involved in the Dolphin planning sessions we're having this week. I've requested some deployment features in the past, including a gigantic whopper of one, and while I can't give away too many details, I can say that there is definitely some hope.

I mentioned wanting an "updatejava.exe" program which would allow you to install specific versions of Java upon request, tremendously simplifying the process of writing installers for Java programs. There's actually a very good chance of such a tool making it into Dolphin, although it would probably have a slightly different name. And lest I erroneously receive credit for this idea, I should point out that this feature was already being investigated before I even suggested it.

The "Browser Edition" I suggested in this entry is a more complex problem. When I wrote that entry, I was in the enviable position of being able to request ridiculous improvements and not having to actually write any of the code. As you can imagine, my position is quickly shifting from "Sun should add support for feature <X> right now!" to "Ummm... well... you see, that's a really hard problem and it would be a lot of work...". Regardless, I think it's okay if I reveal that there is a feature more-or-less identical to what I suggested in the infamous "Browser Edition" blog entry currently under consideration for Dolphin. This should not in any way, shape, or form be construed as a promise that we will actually do it -- in other words, don't get your hopes up -- but it's being considered. At the very least, you should be aware that Java applets are the subject of intense scrutiny around here and we are trying to figure out how to improve them, within the limitations of the time and manpower we actually have available to throw at the problem.

There's a lot of other neat stuff on the table, most of which I probably shouldn't talk about yet. Hopefully the tidbits I've tossed out so far aren't revealing anything that will get me in trouble... In any case, expect some neat stuff from Dolphin's deployment enhancements. It's also not too late to suggest things: we are definitely interested in your feedback.

Comments

• Feedback on what? There's a lot of other neat stuff on the table, most of which I probably shouldn't talk about yet + I can't give away too many details doesn't really give us too much to provide a feedback. Is it that bad to throw all the ideas at the public (with clear statement that these are ideas only) and then have the dialog?

  Posted by: kirillcool on August 04, 2006 at 10:14 AM

• Congratulations, Ethan, and good luck! On the deployment side, i wonder is any thought being given to improving security (or should i say, "enabling security" ;) of JNLP/WebStart so that one doesn't have to have "all-permissions" in your JNLP file, if you use reflection in your app for instance?

  Posted by: evanx on August 05, 2006 at 04:22 AM

• kirillcool: I was referring to feedback on the current state of deployment -- what sort of things would you like to see done with the plugin / Web Start / etc. in the future?
  evanx: The deployment team desperately wants to do that, and I'm told that it's one of the most requested features. Unfortunately I'm not sure the planning committee is going to agree about its importance.

  Posted by: enicholas on August 05, 2006 at 06:09 AM

• Ethan, you're the man we need in there! Deployment is Java's biggest problem & you have the answers - don't let the nitty-gritty of coding get in the way of your vision!

  Posted by: commanderkeith on August 07, 2006 at 12:21 AM

• So how much they paying you then? Is it true what they say about sun...

  Posted by: biffta on August 07, 2006 at 09:13 AM

• biffta: What do they say about Sun?

  Posted by: enicholas on August 07, 2006 at 09:52 AM

• Well great to hear that theres some progress on the deployment front, one of the biggest weaks is taht java is quite hard to install and maintining different versions is a nightmare.One thing which would be great if you could also look at would be an easier update progress - we ended up with having many quite equal java versions installed on our computers in company - so we had to disable java.java is great, but if it consumes more than one gb of hd its not funnny anymore.

  Posted by: linuxhippy on August 07, 2006 at 11:20 PM

• Another problem, what if your users don't have administrative rights and hence cannot install another version of java? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to install without those rights since you have a certificate giving you permissions to their machine anyway? A problem close to my heart...

  Posted by: jcollins100 on August 11, 2006 at 01:29 AM

• Within a year WPF/E will be ubiquitous on the client and it will replace Ajax and Flash for web development. We really need a Java alternative to WPF/E or we will all be C# programmers soon.

  Posted by: robertje on August 17, 2006 at 05:18 AM

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