I'm sure it worked well in many cases. But, in our case, we were developing for Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Windows NT. The VMs would behave differently in different environments, and I remember VMs stack dumping on many occasions which became a major support headache. We used to call it 'build once, run nowhere.'
But, in our case, we were developing for Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Windows NT. The VMs would behave differently in different environments, and I remember VMs stack dumping on many occasions which became a major support headache. We used to call it 'build once, run nowhere.'
Interesting. The only thing I really remember people complaining about a lot was thread scheduling. Java always let you set a thread priority and a lot of people tried to use that to make things behave in very specific ways, but - if I recall correctly - it was the case that that behavior was always allowed to be platform independent and couldn't be relied on to create a consistent cross-platform experience. Outside of that, it seemed like UI issues with Swing (or, I guess, AWT) were the main things people ran into trouble with.
What time frame was all of this for you? Wondering if it was just the very early days of Java before some of the problems were resolved.
Also, Java only provided the lowest common denominator. A piece of software I worked on back then needed to start a long 2hr process, but only if there was more than 2GB of free disk space (which was not a trivial requirement circa 2000). But Java did not have a way to query free disk space at the time because IIRC it was missing on one of the platforms (and then it wouldn't be "run everywhere"). So instead it would run, and if insufficient disk space would just fail.
