Re: > Sandboxed power == More secure???

The main thing that's wrong with it, to my mind, is that it's so bloody long!

And as a result I haven't bothered to read all of it (and don't intend to). By
my impression of it after a quick skim is that it's made up of four kinds of
guidance:

Motherhood and apple pie stuff (Restrict privileges, Do not log highly
sensitive information, Validate inputs,...) which would apply to pretty-much
any code in any language on any platform (where security is any kind of concern
at all). We can't fault them on that, but it might be better split out into
separate guidance ("What every would-be programmer should know before being
allowed within twenty miles of a computer").

Stuff that basically can be paraphrased as "Yup, Sun designed the language
wrong -- we'll all have to live with it. Sorry..."). Integer overflows (not
only do they happen but they happen silently!). Lack of a /convenient/ way of
managing limited resources (such as C#s "using" syntax). Lack of immutable
references (though I have my doubts about whether that can be made meaningful
/and/ useful). Even /having/ public (or protected) mutable fields in the
language at all. Public constructors (rather than factory methods). Etc...

A few examples of plain daft behaviour of the platform classes which should be
fixed pronto. (Such as allowing HTML in Swing components by default). Just
about everything to do with serialisation.

And the last category can be summed up as "the security model is too
complicated, and very easy to get wrong". That's the biggest (by linecount)
item. Not sure what to do about that. Maybe a library along the lines of Doug
Lea's concurrency stuff that hides all the fragile mess inside nice tight
interfaces with clear simple guidelines ?? I say that, but I'm not going to
claim that /I/ could design and implement such a beast (not without
language/JVM changes anyway).

I was under the impression that each applet ran in its own classloader. Am I
wrong ? If not then mutable statics are no worse a problem in applets than
they are anywhere else.