Odd Technology

This is how the world has changed in the last five years or so.

Used to be, you could find book stores, clearance centres, sometimes random piles of books in supermarkets, and there would be dozens, sometimes hundreds, of tech books. Often they were books listed at $70 or $80, but the software they were describing was a generation or two old, so they could be had for anywhere from $5 to $25.

And so I picked up books, tech books. I got books about Visual Basic, Java, Visual Interdev, even Dbase.

One of the books I got was called Network Programming With Visual J++. And I happen to be reading it these evenings. Now my son happened to see it, and he was just a bit incredulous. Visual J++, he asked, mockingly. Does anyone still use that? Did anyone ever use it?

Good question. Microsoft came out with Visual J++ around 1997. It was part of Visual Studio 97, which also included versions of Visual Basic and Visual C++. It was Microsoft’s implementation of Java. It was updated in 1999, as Visual J++ 6.0, part of Visual Studio 6.0

Now the idea behind Java was to create a programming language that would be platform independent. It was developed by Sun Microsystems and licensed to various companies, including Microsoft. To nobody’s surprise, right away Microsoft developed Windows specific object library called WFC, Windows Foundation Classes, which enabled developers to create applications that would only run on Windows. And to nobody’s surprise, Sun sued Microsoft for violations of the agreement.

I saw that agreement. Microsoft put it up on its web site. I thought they were smart doing that. It seemed to me that Microsoft was on solid ground. In due course they settled their litigation. But VJ++ was frozen at Java 1.1. None of the new features that came out in Java 2.0 made it to VJ++.

Amazingly, Visual J++ has been ported to the .NET platform, and renamed J#. And it is less popular than ever.

And so the question remains: what is/was it good for. The marketing seemed to be aimed at Java programmers, in an undoubtedly hopeless attempt to wean them over to Windows.

Well I found a use for it. I did. But it didn’t even work out. A few years ago I found myself with a Java API supplied by a trading partner. So I thought that rather than write a whole Java application, I would create a COM object in VJ++, then use the COM object in my own application. Great idea, but for some strange reason, a COM object written in VJ++ can’t access the API from a class file; it needs the actual source code. I imagine that’s a bug – it can’t possibly be by design because it surely makes no sense at all. And I couldn’t convince the tech department at my counterpart to give me its source code. So I wrote the Java app, not in VJ++ either.

But the book. I read books like this. Not every book I read is useful. In fact many aren’t. But this book, somewhat surprisingly given that it was published by Microsoft Press, is more about Java itself than anything else. Very little about anything specific to Visual J++. And because TCP/IP hasn’t changed much, the Java networking classes haven’t changed much. So the book is surprisingly relevant, if you do any Java programming, which I don’t, but knowledge never hurts.

All those cheap tech books have pretty much disappeared. I guess that’s a sign of the times. From now on I guess I’ll have to rely on the library for my supply of hopelessly outdated and irrelevant books…