Its all how its marketed, Sun/Oracle et al are doing a good job at fooling people.

I have Oracle's jinitiator on my PC, its about 9.5MB of code (what I can find). A lot of this is junk and not needed for database access but it still has to get to my c: drive.

I have Net8 on my PC, this is about 30MB. A lot of this is junk and not needed for database access but still has to get to my C:drive.

I don't have any JDBC (as far as I know) but I'm pretty sure if its there, a lot of it is junk, and it still has to get to my c: drive.

Oracle/Sun et al say Java is thin but its all
smoke and mirrors. Look around your c:drive and look at all the java stuff thats been left there by things that download it while you are twiddling your thumbs. And you need a JVM, that has to get to your c drive somehow. The browser JVM's don't really cut it for real life applications, enter jintiator.

Of course you could download the whole lot each time when you log in, but nobody in their right mind does that more than twice. Its on your c: drive, baby!

When I said you can put Net8 on the network thats what you do, leave it there. Make sure the correct registry settings are made and the path is changed to point to a mapped network drive. This only works on LANS but its a step in the right direction.

What I'm doing is automatically installing Net8 on a PC when they first click on the main executable's Shortcut, the user just sees it slow first time but they have no idea that anything is being installed, likewise with java. Oh except that with java its slow the 2nd, 3rd, 4th time.... [Linked Image].

This is why I want to know the minimum files for a Net8 install, I reckon theres a meg or two of good stuff you really need.

As for getting this all in one exe then you would have to rely on Oracle not changing their internals on the server. They publish the OCI for the client which is what DOA uses, I am sure JDBC has a similar published API (but really haven't got a clue). Whats activex going to do for you? You are now in 32 bit windows mode so essentially you would have to duplicate everything that Net8 does and that is not trivial. So next step is to use the activex control to connect to the published OCI but then you have reinvented DOA!

[This message has been edited by chapeau (edited 10 September 1999).]