THE ACTIVE X QUESTION : : Eric Schmidt, chief technical officer of Sun, Mountain View, Calif., acknowledged the shortcomings of Java, in an interview with ZD Internet Magazine. (A transcript of the interview will be posted on ZD Internet MegaSite on October 16).
But Schmidt emphasized that Active X, the alternative from Microsoft, is much more risky. ``Active X is really a trap. If you're using Active X, you're essentially forcing your customers to choose a browser (Internet Explorer from Microsoft). And maybe your customer doesn't want to have his choice taken away.''
David Smith, an analyst with Gartner Group, Stamford, Conn., said Microsoft's licensing of Java was largely a defensive/precautionary move that does not preclude it from its real strategy: introducing Active X as an infrastructure for the Internet.

MISSING TOOLS, INCOMPATIBILITY : : For the time being, developers said it will take a while before Java becomes powerful enough to displace reliable programming tools like C++. ``I've seen a lot of (Java) tools that are pretty flaky,'' said Craig Cervo, vice president of engineering at Applix Inc., Westboro, Mass.
Even the much touted cross-platform compatibility in Java is not a guarantee. ``If you take it to the Macintosh, it may not run,'' said Terence Parr, president of Magelang Institute, a Java developer in San Francisco.
Jim Coker, an independent consultant in Chicago who has done Java programming projects involving more than 15,000 lines of code for Fortune 500 companies in the Midwest, said,``When you get to larger applications, performance becomes an issue.''
Nathan Schrenk, director of software development at Neoglyphics Media Corp., Chicago, estimated that the performance of Java applications to be two to three times slower than those written natively in C++. But, Schrenk expected that the problem to be resolved with the availability of more Just-In-Time compilers in 1997.
Whether these compilers will come on the market soon enough could determine the acceptance of Java as a long-term solution. Some are circumspect. Patrick Vermont, group product manager for Java tools at Borland International Inc., Scotts Valley, Calif.: ``I wonder whether the lack of maturity - relating not only to the tools, but also the language itself - will impact the success of Java.''
Vermont said the commercial version of Latte, Borland's development tools for Java, will be available by year-end, followed by the release of full-featured Java-based applications in another eight to 16 months.
Other tools such as Café from Symantec Corp., Visual J++ from Microsoft Corp. and Java Workshop from Javasoft have recently become available. However, their functions are less than ideal.
``All of these are still in their first-generation tools,'' said Cornelius Willis, product manager of Internet tools at Microsoft, Redmond, Wash. Willis said in many cases features such as high-speed database access are missing in these tools.
As a result, some developers are relying on their own tools to write the programs. At Applix, for example, Tony Giannelli, vice president of business development, said the company has been using its own tools, which are database components licensed from Visigenic, to build Java front-ends for stock brokerages and manufacturing companies that need to access real-time data like commodity prices.
Others are treating Java as an important but not indispensable software component, or in some cases simply discarding it without second thoughts.

JAVA PROJECTS SCRAPPED : : ``The market is far too young for serious mission-critical work,'' said a consultant who works for large publishing companies and asked not to be named.
He said a couple of his clients decided to scrap their Java projects in favor of Active X or C++ because of performance issues. ``We found Java to be extremely slow and there were no debugging tools equivalent to C++,'' he said.
Scott Cook, chairman of Intuit Inc., Mountain View, Calif., a leading developer of personal-finance applications, said, ``Java is a tool. You have got to use the right tool for the job, like C or C++. We do a lot of work on Java, but I don't think it's a religious issue. How many customers have run up to us or any banks and said I really want you to be using Java? People don't care. They want you to get the job done.''
Even for some developers that have made considerable investments in Java, they expect the final products to be a scaled-down version of their Windows programs.
Chris Biber, technology evangelist at Corel Corp., Ottawa, said it expects to release a beta version of the Corel Office Suite for Java by year-end, but it will not be comparable to its Windows version, which has already reached its eighth iteration. ``Feature for feature, it won't be one for one,'' Biber said. At the same time, Biber said Corel continues to invest heavily in future Windows versions of its Office Suite.

STRENGTHS OF JAVA : : Clearly, there are reasons to believe Java would be successful, developers said. Its features such as integrated threading and built-in garbage collection, which gives programmers the flexibility not to allocate memory to every piece of code, are superior to those in C++.
``It's easier than C++. In Java, you don't have to worry about memory allocation,'' said Chris Weiland, senior software engineer at GroupWorks Technology, Evanston, Ill., which is developing a Java front-end for a health-care application.
Added Michael Shoffner, vice president of strategic development at Prominence.com, a developer in Chapel Hill, N.C.: ``It's a beautiful language to work with.''
Others said the dearth of mission-critical Java applications has merely underscored the expectation levels Web developers have for any high-profile technology like the Internet.
``The Internet has been overbought and Java has been overbought. The world has huge expectations. So how do you solve all these things in time and under budget?'' said Dwight Koop, co-owner of Newlogic, a Chicago developer.
In any case, developers said what the market has seen over the past 18 months is only a prelude to what Java could bring to the world of Internet computing.
``Has it changed the way people develop applications? The answer is no. Will it as we go forward? The answer is yes,'' said David Gee, Java marketing manager of IBM Corp. in Chicago.
Gee expects that many IBM customers are figuring out how to incorporate Java into their enterprise networks and actual implementations will take place over the next six to 12 months when tools become more readily available.
``Companies are piloting specific areas to try that model out,'' Gee said. ``Adoption rate has proved to be faster than anyone thought.''