Re: Bye-bye Java: impact on technical communications?

[Richard L Hamilton <dick -at- rlhamilton -dot- net>]

Clearly this is a serious problem (I've turned off java browser plugins across the board), but java is much more than the plugins.

I don't believe java is going away or that it's irredeemable. If it did go away, the impact on tech comm would be significant. Large parts of the infrastructure that many (most?) companies use for XML processing is based on java (fop, saxon, several commercial editors, some commercial PDF formatters, ant, and a lot of supporting software like epubcheck, jing, trang, .....). In fact, I'm nearly positive that you cannot build an open source tool chain for DITA or DocBook without java, and you might not be able to build a commercial tool chain without it. At least, you would lose some very capable options (oxygen, saxon, renderx, to name a few).

So, get it off your browsers, but java's not going to disappear anytime soon.

Richard Hamilton
-------
XML Press
New from XML Press:
Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits
http://xmlpress.net/publications/content-strategy


On Jan 11, 2013, at 9:43 AM, sphilip wrote:

> Despite the fact that this exploit only involves Java plug-ins, it does seem to me that the entire product is tainted beyond redemption.
> 
> If so, I'd have thought the biggest impact as far as Tech Comm is concerned is going to be on publishers of all those Intro Java books. Over the last 15 years or so, huge numbers of uni's teach Java as their intro programming lang' instead of C/C++. 
> 
> BTW, if you haven't caught the news Ars Technica have a nice piece on it here:
> 
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/critical-java-zero-day-bug-is-being-massively-exploited-in-the-wild/
> 
> 
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Read all about them: http://bit.ly/doc-to-help-10-outputs
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