This system administrator hates Java almost as much as Windows. I'm still enraged at the old lie "compile once, run everywhere". Just look at what Java does to the Red Hat "alternatives" system, although I can't imagine any prettier body cast around that catastrophe.
Reading your comment the irony occurs to me that the best solution to "compile once" has been real VMs. Not Java VMs, but full god damned fucking virtual machines running the OS and environment you determine should run in them.
You've still got to provision those, but, well, they're individual and isolated and tend not to go hammering into one another. Other than consuming all available system resources.
Oddly: IBM got this right with VM ... 40 years ago?
