From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>

"Edge for Sun as Microsoft Embraces Java."

By John Markoff

http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/0425license.html

From the article:

SAN FRANCISCO -- Sun Microsystems Inc., already a stock-market favorite on the strength of its Internet products, has secured a significant endorsement from Microsoft Corp., which plans to announce next week that it will incorporate Sun's Java software programming language into the Microsoft Windows 95 personal computer operating system.

The companies would not comment, but industry executives said Microsoft, whose Windows operating system is used on some 80 percent of the world's PCs, will join IBM and Novell, among other companies, in announcing plans to embed Java into their software operating systems.

Those moves, and the possibility of a similar endorsement by Apple Computer Inc., should go a long way toward making Java an industry software standard in the rapidly expanding Internet market.

In other Java news, the report from the Princeton scientists who have found many security weaknesses in Java is now available at <URL: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/pub/secure96.html >. It is very critical of the language design and implementation. I don't fully agree with the thrust of their criticisms, because I don't think provability is a practical matter with programs complex enough to be useful. But they have certainly identified an alarming number of problems. I will post later today a list of the issues they have identified. Hal