Tim -- HotJava is a web browser that happens to be written in a language called Java, that runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine, which is part of what gives this combination of tools the high degree of platform independence we've been talking about. JVM is the thing that is currently being ported to different platforms both by Sun and by others. Also, there is the Abstract Windowing Toolkit, which provides a set of platform-independent, browser-embeddable GUI tools. HotJava is the first (and certainly won't be the last) web browser that allows you to have small Java programs (called applets) as an HTML document type. These are obtained by the browser in the same way it obtains a GIF, but they are interpreted and run on the client machine. A Java program is compiled into Java bytecodes, which have certain properties that prevent them from, say, breaking out of their address space, playing cute games with the CPU, etc. Applets are composed of bytecodes. Most of the existing applets do stuff like 3D models you can rotate with the mouse, irritating animations, and enhancements to forms technology, but Java is a general-purpose language -- one of the most impressive applets I saw initially was a spreadsheet, plonked down in the middle of a web page. Admittedly, it was a really stupid spreadsheet, but it did a good job of convincing me that you could really do anything with this stuff. I don't get what you mean when you say, "Java isn't ready for the home market." True, I don't think that programming languages of any sort are part of the "home market", but I think that Java will enable people like cypherpunks to write extremely portable applications _once_ that will be embeddable on web pages viewed by browsers like Netscape. I can't think of anything that is going to come closer to your definition of "winning" the home market. Certainly the home market will be dominated in short order by Win 95 and MacOS (mostly the former.) I think the Win 95 port of the Java environment is only awaiting release of Win 95, and the MacOS port has been demoed around town. Also, Java is entirely orthogonal to issues like particular protocols or formats, in the same sense the C or Smalltalk are orthogonal to those same issues. It's just that we will be able to embed access to those protocols and formats into the popular tools without huge porting nightmares, or even requiring much cooperation from the vendors themselves, who are often limited politically by what they can put in themselves.