Remember the clowns who said Java sucked and was useless for a trading platform? Meanwhile IB's TWS and Ameritrade TOS is all Java. Suckers wrong again.
The early versions of Java were flawed in a manner that made them a bad choice for realtime trading platforms. The garbage collector (the function which identifies memory that has been allocated but is no longer needed and is released for use by other processes) would run at random times and would cause the app to slow down momentarily until it was finished. This could be a disaster for a realtime trading where you may have a critical order submission that suddenly hangs while the garbage collector would do its thing. Modern versions of Java manage memory more efficiently so this is no longer an issue.
Now the problem with Java is that it is constantly (at least it seems like constantly) nagging you to update... they should write it so that it automatically downloads, doesn't nag you and installs on next reboot (if you agree to a dialog when you're shutting down the computer) - but that would be common sense.. maybe if there was a super-duper-disastrous ultra-wide security hole then it could prompt you to install soon... same goes for Windows Update. I had a non pro version of Windows before and the registry hacks wouldn't work to prevent it from auto-restarting when it deemed fit (i.e. f*ck the user), I thought I was SoL but then I discovered there are some tray applications that can run and prevent the computer from rebooting.
That's a known bug. Some even reported appearance of margin calls because of it. The most recent java version fixes that somewhat. But the release notes stated that they could not guarantee there would be sufficient funds left on the credit card.
wasn't that you? And were you not the one bitching about IB's TWS to no end? Or did I confuse you with someone of a similar nick.
totally wrong. been a tws user for over a decade, if anything I defended it when most were bashing read all of my 17k posts for further insight