I agree that the major innovation, and cypherpunk opportunity, of Java is in its cross-platform nature, not its vaunted ability to run untrusted code safely. I'm sorry, I'm just not interested in running untrusted code. Give me digitally signed code that I can trust, or for which the author can at least be held accountable, and I'll be happy.

Absolutely!

As cool as many of the people on the Java team are, though, I am dubious that Java is going to live up to the hype. It is still not clear to me that Microsoft is going to support it seriously in their browser, which by mid-1997 will be so tightly integrated with the lowest-common-denominator operating system that there will be no room for Netscape.

There was an official announcement at their Professional Developers Conference a few weeks back. In short, full support in the browsers (and apparently MS is now the keeper of the reference implementation on Win32) and also a full blown Java development environment code-named 'Jakarta'. -Blake