It’s a lazy Friday afternoon in Reno, Nevada and we suddenly have a power outage. This is the perfect time to get together and have one of those meetings which might seal the fate of Java at PC-Doctor. An executive decision needs to be taken if we will move our User Interface from Java to C# and .Net. The storm has been brewing for quite some time now. We have been using Java along with SWT/Eclipse RCP/JFace for our UI for past 3 years and Java is making us immobile. The JRE size is dragging us down. We have a very pretty UI and we had a highly agile and automated system in place to get the job done but Java (specially the JRE, which needs to be shipped with our product) is becoming a bottle neck.
How it all started
PC-Doctor is the leading vendor for Hardware Diagnostic solutions and all our diagnostics are in C++. To present it to the end user we use Java/SWT/JFace. We use Excelsior’s Jet to compile our SWT/Java code and even poor excelsior (they have an excellent product and great customer service though) could not get us what we desired. Sun has a stupid clause which does not allow to strip off unwanted components from the JRE and you are forced to ship all of it which is a whooping about 15 Megs. Imagine trying to sell your product to a person in one of the third world country (where internet bandwidth matters ). Someone just wanted to test his system and we can test all darn things possible in the machine with just few megs of our efficient C++ code, but just to present it to the user we have to add another 20 Megs which doesn’t make any sense. C# comes in handy due to it inter-operating very nicely (generating wrappers using SWIG was a breeze which was a lot of work to get it to work correctly with Java) with our engine code which is in C++. Moreover with C# we now have many system specific resources at our disposal which previously we would have to use C++ to accomplish and implement.
Opinions
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I am a die-hard avid Java supporter and it’s hard for me to push for C#, but C# comes out as a better language because they had the advantage of stealing all good things from Java and C++ and when you have the muscle and money power of Microsoft you could hire some sensible developers to get something right. It seems they almost got C# right. But with the kind of products we make we need to be highly agile and have a UI which could be easily developed and C# just fits in perfect. SWT/JFace/Eclipse RCP is the best thing to have happened to the UI world in last 10 years but it still lacks a good visual studio editor support and when agility is needed it is a tad little extra work.
Anyways after some initial hiccups i decided to join the evil side and we decided to port our UI to C#.
I will keep you posted on how it feels to be on the evil side and how the grass looks from the evil world (hopefully greener 🙂 ).
