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By Sarah Left, 23 September 1998 16:28

NEWS Microsoft came under fire yesterday for its Windows-centric approach to Java. Delegates at Bloor Research's Java conference in London accused Microsoft of failing to stay true to the 'write once, run anywhere' ethos of the technology. Microsoft's representative at the conference, marketing manager Mike Pryke-Smith, was told by one frustrated attendee: "We want cross-platform applications. What are you doing to make Java cross-platform - to make it helpful to us?" Pryke-Smith counter-attacked, saying Java has significant performance problems to overcome. "At some stage, if you are planning to deploy pure Java applications as defined by companies like Sun, you will hit a wall of purity and you will not be able to write fully functional applications. You hit a productivity wall," he said. He warned delegates that a pure Java approach would sacrifice performance. "You are compromising so much; you have to come down to the lowest common denominator for cross-platform. You have to access the operating system to get the functionality." He continued: "Complex applications don't work now with Java. There's a business advantage if you make use of the Windows platform." However, Miles Whitehead from the Research Standards and Policies Group at Reuters, said his company's experience had been exactly the opposite, with server-side Java performing better than on more simplistic functions. "Our problems came in the applets in the GUI," he explained. Robin Bloor, head of Bloor Research and conference host, described Microsoft's approach as propaganda. "Microsoft's revenue streams are completely and utterly threatened by Java," he said. Microsoft and Sun begin a trial over the future of Java next month.