Rocky Mountain Ruby 2013 Befriending the Turtles by Glenn Vanderburg

so at around the same time while I was working at UT Dallas, I was became one of the first people outside of Sun Microsystems to get his hands on a copy of Java.

It was still called "Oak"at that time, and I learned it really early on and compared to the other things I had available to me it looked pretty cool, and I got into it a little bit, and as a result I was signed on to write

a book about it. And those of you who remember 1995, and Java at that time, remember that one of the things people were excited about was applets, and part of the supporting structure for that was this security model for untrusted code that was built in to the Java Virtual Machine, so in the outline I proposed for this book I was going to write a

chapter on the security model, which was thoroughly undocumented. But no worries. One of the secret weapons of Java programmers back in those days was that, almost alone among serious programming languages that people used in industry Java came with a jar file, well, a zip file, then, of all the source code of its standard library. So, no sweat that this is undocumented; I'm the kind of guy who was taught not to be afraid and I can crack open this stuff and go in and read it and figure it out, so I'll write this chapter.

And I got started on it, and then that was when I learned that really there was a small subset of Java library classes that we didn't have the source code for, and the Security Manager was one of them.

Now alert viewers will probably be saying, "That's an elephant, not a turtle. Why is this picture here in a talk about turtles?"

Because Rincewind and the elephant are standing on a giant turtle.

So I had committed to write this thing about the Java Security model, and to my surprise I found that I did NOT have the source code to the Security Manager, so I decided while I thought about that problem I'd write the rest of the book and write the security chapter last.