Alex Strasheim wrote:
Our Navigator 3.0 release will allow java and javascript to call into plugins. Since plugins are native code, you will be able to freely mix C and Java. Of course you will have to get the user to install your plugin on their disk.
That's the problem, installing the plugin.
I (and some others, I think) was hoping that it would be possible to build powerful crypto applets and put them up on web pages. That way everyone with a java enabled copy of Netscape could use a remailer or send crypted mail without having to download, install, and configure software.
If people have to download and install a plugin to use a java mixmaster applet, why not just download and install a native mixmaster client?
Of course there are other reasons to use java -- platform independence, for example. But it's the user's ability to download and run applets just by jumping to a web page that has everyone excited. With that gone (for crypto), java loses a lot of its lustre (again, for crypto work).
It might be interesting to make a small plugin that just does some core stuff like gathering entropy, mod-exp, and related stuff difficult or too slow in java. I mainly brought it up because people were asking about calling native code from java. --Jeff -- Jeff Weinstein - Electronic Munitions Specialist Netscape Communication Corporation jsw@netscape.com - http://home.netscape.com/people/jsw Any opinions expressed above are mine.