Best viewed with Netscape
The latest µSR Java GUI is supported primarily for Netscape
because Micro$oft has elected to remove RMI support from its
Java Virtual Machine (VM) in new versions of Internet Explorer.
(See paragraphs 391-393 of the recent
judgement against Micro$oft for details.)
In principle the user can locate the RMI components and
restore this capability to IE but
the RMI.ZIP file from the Micro$oft site
doesn't seem to restore RMI capability to IE;
the one from IBM
is needed; and in any case this patch is rather tedious for novice users.
Besides, the escalation of
standard-busting practices
by Micro$oft
suggests that they will find other ways to make it difficult or impossible
to access non-Micro$oft resources using Micro$oft tools
or vice versa.
The µSR Java GUI was built with
IFC 1.1. Download now if needed.
In addition, we have decided to take advantage of Netscape's
Internet
Foundation Classes (a GUI library written in pure Java 1.1)
for the first version, simply because Java 1.1 and its AWT
lack the needed features.
This promises to be corrected in Java 1.2,
which implements the Java Foundation Classes (JFC)
inspired largely by the IFC;
but Java 1.2 is not yet fully debugged for Linux.
The next major revision of the µSR Java GUI
will be written entirely in pure Java 1.2
once it is "universally" available.
Determined IE users who successfully install the RMI patch
will still have a longer initial download of the µSR Java GUI
(600-700 KB vs. 113 KB) because IE naturally does not
include the IFC. You can. of course, obtain the IFC and try to incorporate
them into your IE along with RMI, unless Micro$oft has found a way
to corrupt any "foreign" Java Classes.
Jess H. Brewer
Last modified: Thu 11 Nov 1999