Hello everybody.

I recently had an argument with a friend about how Java was not fast enough to do any serious software development with it. My argument was that many of my "clients" (you) still have some pretty old machines in use and any Java application more complicated than a random quote generator will crawl on that kind of hardware... He dared me to make a poll to find out and here it goes.
Vote for whatever fits your hardware best and if you want list the exact setup in your reply.

The goal behind this is to find out what audience I'm developing for and which programing language would be most sensible (i.e. would Java be too slow)

Please no flamewars, this is just a poll. Java is a great language. So is C++. All is good...

I don't own any PC i own a mac.

Well I love Java but I know what you mean.

My PC is a bit naff (1.3GHz 256 RAM) but I use it for web-design more than anything else, so it does its job. My wife has 2.1 GHz with 512 RAM and a GeForce 4; she uses it to play solitaire. Trust me, you have never seen those cards move so smoothly...

Drat.. forgot the macs... is there any way to compare the PPC to a pentium? I personaly own a Pentium M, which isn't listed either. Just try to estimate...

I recently had an argument with a friend about how Java was not fast enough to do any serious software development with it.

You are correct, Sir, but Java has better overhead, stability and security than the MS stuff and is ideal for business style applications. For more robustness, look at C progging; for faster speeds go for PHP.

Athlon 1600XP, 512MB RAM. Runs modern java based programs very zippily.

1.25ghz G4 Powerbook, 768MB RAM. Runs modern java based programs zippily.

2x2.0ghz G5 Powermac, 2.5GB RAM. Do you have to ask?

I own a P3 750mhz, 256 RAM, 80 Gigs HD, G-Force 2 mx200

Java does run slow.

-Gig

I don't have a Pentium, I have an AMD (but I did submit on the poll anyway...)

Java does have the advantage of portability, and unless you're doing some serious hardware cranking stuff, I doubt you'll hit a serious problem.

Java's speed is hardly the reason a lot of people don't like it. It's the fact that most of the software created on it is unstable, unweildly rubbish that'll crash at the tiniest inconvience it encounters and is a pain to use. The platform simply sucks and sucks hard.

Let's try and keep things somewhat on-topic/productive.

Powerbook and Powermac G4 500Mhz. Java stuff takes a while to load, but is decently peppy thereafter.

Really, Java's ok. There are other things that are better for a lot of tasks, but for simple stuff that you don't want to spend a lot of time porting to different OSs and architectures, it's pretty good.

Edit: for reference, the computers mentioned above are three and four years old, respectively.

~J

Currently I have a PowerBook 1Ghz w/ 768 meg of RAM, and an Athlon MP 1800+ FreeBSD machine. There's also an old Athlon Thunderbird 1Ghz XP box still running too.

I haven't ever had a problem with Java software other than the fact that most Java developers haven't really taken multiple platform development into account, or aren't programming as good as they should be to make Java really shine.

Oh, and nothing beats Obj-C and Cocoa for software development.

Another Mac owner, although feel free to factor in the decade old NeXT slab in your poll, too. Its a blazing 25 mhz!

All those pentium 4's with 2ghz procs. Damn, I need more money.

AMD Athlon 1.04 GHZ. 384 Megs of DDR.

What program are you making Sandman?

Yeah, I'd like to know what kind of program Sandman has in mind... Seems like it might be something rather interesting judging by his inquiries.

My PC is a Compaq Pressario S3300NX 2.1 GHz, 512MB Ram, 160GB HD, 128MB Video Card.

I also have a 400 mHz Lombard Powerbook running OS 9 & OS X with 384 MB Ram, and a CPU-upgraded PPC8600 with a 500 mHz G3, 896MB Ram, 32 MB Radeon Video Card, running OS 9.1, 9.2.2 and OS X (twin 20 GB HD with two bootable partitions each - one OS 9.X, one OS X)

Something interesting by my inquiries? So far I only asked what machines I'm developing for (hardware and OS).

Currently I'm working on a cross plattform character generator. Not because I don't like NSRCG but because there's simply no such thing available on Linux, which is my main platform (and I don't want to bother with emulators. Tried once, got frustrated.)

So, this is currently in the planning stage. There's not a line of code written yet. Right now I'm trying to decide on the requirements and the structure of the program, get a feature list together, etc. Once I'm done with that (which will take at least a few more weeks, busy as I am now) I will start coding and eventually put the thing on sourceforge to open it to the public and get more developers in. The major decision lingering in my mind right now is whether to use Java or the open source cross-platform library wxWidgets (with C++). I'll probably go with wxWidgets, for several reasons.

The whole project right now is becoming much more complicated as I originaly thought it would since one of my main directives is extensability. The thing should be flexible enough to handle pretty much all the rules in the book, with as little hardcoding as possible. In practice this means that the database will be built in a way that allows me to link certain "rules" to any item. (rules like "any level of this item raises a given attribute by one, maximum level allowed is body +2 / 3, round down").
This has basically two purposes. For one I'm circumventing any copyright issues since - should fanpro complain - I can release the program without any copyrighted material (so everyone has to build their own item, spell, vehicle, ware, etc. catalogues) and for the other introducing complicated custom gear becomes possible.
The character generation rules will off course be hardcoded.

I'm also trying to improve the user interface. Somehow I wasn't quite content with NSRCGs UI. Nothing against McMackie, I think he's done the community a great service.

For me it's a way of applying the theories from my Computer Science studies at university and get some practice in using them. I'm trying to not just hack together a little CharGen but to really engineer it. This involves things like proper documentation, a clean object-orientated approach and actually planning before coding so that errors can be avoided and the whole program runs a lot more stable and will just generally be cleaner and more efficient (it's amazing what planning can do for you!). And it would also be a good oppotunity for me to learn the wxWidgets API

So, yea, that's what I'm working on right now.
More will definately follow, should I ever get this finished. Following the Linux approach I will not build one giant, monolithic application that can do everything but a suit of smaller programs. Eventually I will build things like a deck builde, vehicle builder, gun builder, a GM Helper (which is actually in planning for quite a while now, without anything concrete).
The goal is to create a suite of high quality programs that look and work similarly and work together well (build a gun in the gun shop and then import it to the character generator or GM Helper - build a PC in the character generator and import it into the GM helper - build an NPC in the GM helper and import it into the character generator as a possible contact, or the other way around).

That's my great vision. I hope I can make it come true one day...

Main PC:
Athlon XP 2600+, 512MB DDR 333MHz, Windows XP Pro

Notebook:
Mobile Celeron 600, 320MB SDRAM 100MHz, Windows ME

• Workstation:
  P4, 2,8GHz HT, 1 GB RAM, 80GB Harddisk, DVD Drive, CD-RW Burner
• Server:
  Dual Xeon 2,4 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 960 GB in Harddisks, DVD+/- Burner
• Secondary Workstation:
  Athlon 1800+, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB Harddisk, DVD Drive, CD-RW-Burner
• Router/Proxy:
  PII, 450MHz, 384 MB RAM, 18 GB Harddisk, CD Drive

Workstations are Multi-OS-Machines (currently WinXP, Debian Linux)
Server currently runs under Win 2000 Server but will go Linux sooner or later
Router runs FreeBSD

I've got someone working on something similar; I'm not sure how much you'd be able to get from each other, but I can put you in touch. It might help.

~J

Depends, I guess. I'm pretty advanced in my planning stage and since I really don't know what the similarities are I can't really say how usefull that would be. Can you give more specifics?

I don't know what all he's done or how he's done it, but I can try to put him in touch with you if you want. Just trying to avoid having two independently-developed, full-featured generators out there if it's possible to share the load. Let me know.

~J

Server: AMD 2000+ with a 1 gig RAM
Desktop: AMD 2400+ with 1 gig RAM
Laptop: Intel P4 1.8 with 512 RAM

Desktop: T-Bird 1.2 with 512 megs DDR ram
Laptop: Celron 300 with 128 megs SD ram

On JAVA (developing in that Stuff since 1999):

- Get one of the current versions (1.4.2 i.e)

- RAM, lot's of RAM. I take a PIII/800 with 512MB over a 1.2GHz machine any time

- You can get a decent performance with machines from a PIII/800, 256MB onward (our current test unit)

- JAVA is a rugged, stable language due to it's error handling abilities. And the "Write once, fail everywhere" is great. We write complex (3-tier, J2EE(EJB), 400+ classes) applications and as long as the database data is the same, I can reproduce every error the customer reports. Even though his server is a big SOLARIS Box and I use Windows XP and/or Linux. Great for debugging

- Make sure that the Applet (if you use one) uses the JAVA Plugin, not the old integrated machine

- JAVA is no excuse for lousy coding.


Birdy

I curse you all, I'm stuck with a laptop thats runing a 1 gig celeron, 256 ram.

No JAVA please.

Sandman,
how's it going with your app? Did you make a final decision on language?

[edit]
oh... AMD-64 3400+ w/ 1GB RAM, 17" widescreen notebook
[/edit]

1.2GHz P4 processor, 512MB RAM, dual monitors.

looks like the "average" is a % of 7.7% on the poll.
The lowest 7.79% is a "Pentium 3 under 1 GHz, less then 256 MB RAM"

Given the large amount of people who have "less then 256 MB RAM", seems like no matter the processor that you might look into building for lower RAM.

Personally, I would build it for the "Pentium 3 under 1 GHz, less then 256 MB RAM".
Everybody else would just enjoy ZOOM speed while at least the P3/1G/256-ers would be able to use it at normal speed.

Er? By my count, there are only 16 people with under 256 megs of RAM as compared to 32 in the 2.0+GHz/512+MB RAM category alone.

~J

Put me down for the lower end of the spectrum. I'm on a laptop.

Got an Athlon 2200+ with 512 Ram. So i clicked Pentium 4 with over 512.

I remember in 1998 when the head of IT for the University of Texas at Arlington tried to convince us in our HTML class that PHP & all CGI were dinosaurs and would be over taken by Java.

Predictions are fun, especially when folks act like they know what there talking about.

It also depends on what OS they're running. Someone running System 6 with 64 megs of RAM will be flying, while the same RAM on OSX or XP is woefully insufficient.

~J

What is your OS of choice?