33 ms·

> I started developing in Java, late 2001. At that time, Java was really cool. As someone who was there in 2001, I just have to say: Java was never cool, and e

by krig 9y ago

> I started developing in Java, late 2001. At that time, Java was really cool. As someone who was there in 2001, I just have to say: Java was never cool, and especially not at that time. It was bloated and ugly and slow, the GC was terrible, applets were simply the worst, the UI toolkits available looked horrible on every single platform. There were no decent IDEs or editors and the language was if possible even more verbose and circumspect back then.

xaduha 9y ago
> As someone who was there in 2001, I just have to say: Java was never cool, and especially not at that time. It was so uncool they named JavaScript after it.
- wolfi1 9y ago
  that was earlier than 2001 I believe
  - goatlover 9y ago
    1995. Interesting because Java was initially Oak, and JS was LiveScript. But then Netscape & Sun got together. Sun wanted Java to be the language in the browser, Netscape wanted an easy to use lightweight language, Brendan Eich thought he would be putting Scheme in the browser, and the end result of all that was JavaScript. But Netscape 2 was also supposed to ship with the JVM and a canvas-like platform for both to target. However, it was too ambitious, so only JS made it.
raugustinus 9y ago
I tend to agree here. But wasn't that the sorry state for like all languages out there? Or at least a combination of the reasons you mention.
- krig 9y ago
  Yeah, in hindsight it wasn't a great time for programming languages in general...
gaius 9y ago
Java was cool when I started using it "in anger" in 1995. It was going to be a totally new way of delivering software on the fly over the network (that's why all the package names look like reverse domain names). I moved to Python when Java gave up on the dream and became the new COBOL after the dotcom crash.
- SCdF 9y ago
  > It was going to be a totally new way of delivering software on the fly over the network That sounds really interesting! Has any documentation survived about that?
  - rsynnott 9y ago
    Lots. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_applet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_applet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Web_Start https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Web_Start for links.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      You forgot Jini, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini Also Oberon was another system that also allowed for something like Java applets, called Juice. http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt69.htm http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt69.htm
      - rsynnott 9y ago
        Ugh, yes, so I did, though that was less about software deployment.
        le-mark 9y ago
        None of these examples are especially illuminating here. In my opinion, two things really exhibit this "code over the network" nature; the class URLClassloader that's been in Java forever and the JVM SecurityManager system. URLClassLoader will load bytecode from any url; give it a url to a jar at some domain and it'll load it. The JVM security model was intended to let app developers define exactly what code could be executed, and what resources could be accessed on the client machine. The other stuff like JNI (a registry for RPC endpoints) and java rmi itself were baked into the standard libraries from the beginning as well. But the envisioned "software agents running on arbitrary machines on the network" never took off, seems kind of foolhardy in hindsight, that anyone would think that's a good idea.
pjmlp 9y ago
It surely was cool, on my university department they completely changed all compiler design and distributed computing classes to be based on Java by 1997, just one year after it got released. On the startup that I was on back in 2000, we were planing to drop out TCL based application server by J2EE, only to change the decision on the last minute by .NET. The reason being that we were Microsoft partners that were invited to try out this cool new thing called .NET, before betas were available to the press, and have our products be ".NET 1.0 ready" by launch date.
vram22 9y ago
The Java servlet API and ecosystem was quite cool at least in the early years, IMO. Very simple and elegant model, and I did some commercial work with Java servlets. There were 3-rd-party servlet engines (before they started calling them fancier names like containers after J2EE v1 started :), like LiteWebServer and JRun (good fun using them), apart from the Sun reference implementation and and more heavyweight ones like Tomcat which came a bit later, IIRC. I remember following the Tomcat mailing list for some time, and there was intense activity on it for a long time. Also used Tomcat and JBoss later in a few projects. I sometimes mention Jason Hunter's O'Reilly book "Java Servlet Programming" (1st edition) as one of the best programming books I've read, both for the content and the quality of the writing and the code examples. J2EE v1 was slow and considered by many to be over-engineered (probably why slow). Used it in one project but didn't like it. I've heard that after v3 or so (from then called JEE) it became lighter and better. Maybe others can comment on that. And from some time there have been other options like Spring, etc. Found Spring rather complex too on an initial look. What do people on here like using for Java web apps these days (those who do use it)? Heard of Wicket and Play, I know there must be others.
- Joeri 9y ago
  I've been using play + java 8 for the past two years. Have been quite happy with it. I did php and node.js before, and I can't say I'm missing anything in particular from those ecosystems. Build times could be a tad better, and some aspects could use more documentation, but the code is easy to write and maintain and the app is blazing fast and easy to deploy. I've gotten the same positive feedback from other web devs that joined my team. They all like it.
  - vram22 9y ago
    Thanks for the info. Might check out Play. Yes, Java performance is fast. I had read that Sun had put millions of dollars into making it fast [1], hiring very qualified people to work on the compiler, the JIT engine, etc., over a period of many years. And the speed difference between early and later Java versions was perceptible. [1] Apart from the millions they also put into marketing Java to enterprises. And that worked, as we know. It became huge in the enterprise and still is.
wink 9y ago
I found it cool in the "approachble, usable" sense. At least I got a lot further than with C++. (My background at the time was purely Visual Basic and PHP). Then again I am still not a fan of C++ today :P
0x445442 9y ago
Agreed. I started with Java in 96 or 97; pretty much from the beginning. For me the big win with Java as the HTML documentation of the JDK. It meant I didn't have to grep around the file system and header files to figure out what abstractions I was meant to use. But in 2000 I started messing with other languages like Python and Perl; at which point Java became nothing more to me than tech to put food on the table.
gozur88 9y ago
By 2001 a lot of the problems java was designed to address were going away for other reasons. When it first came out it had some major advantages: It was free, so you could try it in the corporate setting without spending thousands of dollars, and your application would work on multiple operating systems without a recompile. I remember being involved in a project in which we developed and tested an application on PCs. One of our customers called up one day and asked if it worked on his linux box. "I have no idea," I said, "nobody's ever tried it." He tried it and it worked flawlessly. That doesn't seem like a big deal today with web apps, but in the late '90s it was black magic. Also, before Flash and before Javascript was good enough to build full-featured applications, pretty much the only way you were going to do an interactive web application was using java applets.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I was still deep into C++ back then, Java was a sweet deal versus the pain of trying to write portable C++ with compilers trying to catch up with the ongoing work for the first version of the standard.
chrshawkes 9y ago
Exactly, back up a few years and it was still a buggy and bloated slow piece of shit. Which is the reason why Google decided to go with Python in the 90's when Java was the original language their search engine was written in.

by krig 9y ago

xaduha 9y ago

> As someone who was there in 2001, I just have to say: Java was never cool, and especially not at that time. It was so uncool they named JavaScript after it.

wolfi1 9y ago
that was earlier than 2001 I believe
- goatlover 9y ago
  1995. Interesting because Java was initially Oak, and JS was LiveScript. But then Netscape & Sun got together. Sun wanted Java to be the language in the browser, Netscape wanted an easy to use lightweight language, Brendan Eich thought he would be putting Scheme in the browser, and the end result of all that was JavaScript. But Netscape 2 was also supposed to ship with the JVM and a canvas-like platform for both to target. However, it was too ambitious, so only JS made it.

raugustinus 9y ago

I tend to agree here. But wasn't that the sorry state for like all languages out there? Or at least a combination of the reasons you mention.

krig 9y ago
Yeah, in hindsight it wasn't a great time for programming languages in general...

gaius 9y ago

Java was cool when I started using it "in anger" in 1995. It was going to be a totally new way of delivering software on the fly over the network (that's why all the package names look like reverse domain names). I moved to Python when Java gave up on the dream and became the new COBOL after the dotcom crash.

SCdF 9y ago
> It was going to be a totally new way of delivering software on the fly over the network That sounds really interesting! Has any documentation survived about that?
- rsynnott 9y ago
  Lots. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_applet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_applet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Web_Start https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Web_Start for links.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    You forgot Jini, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini Also Oberon was another system that also allowed for something like Java applets, called Juice. http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt69.htm http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt69.htm
    - rsynnott 9y ago
      Ugh, yes, so I did, though that was less about software deployment.
      - le-mark 9y ago
        None of these examples are especially illuminating here. In my opinion, two things really exhibit this "code over the network" nature; the class URLClassloader that's been in Java forever and the JVM SecurityManager system. URLClassLoader will load bytecode from any url; give it a url to a jar at some domain and it'll load it. The JVM security model was intended to let app developers define exactly what code could be executed, and what resources could be accessed on the client machine. The other stuff like JNI (a registry for RPC endpoints) and java rmi itself were baked into the standard libraries from the beginning as well. But the envisioned "software agents running on arbitrary machines on the network" never took off, seems kind of foolhardy in hindsight, that anyone would think that's a good idea.

pjmlp 9y ago

It surely was cool, on my university department they completely changed all compiler design and distributed computing classes to be based on Java by 1997, just one year after it got released. On the startup that I was on back in 2000, we were planing to drop out TCL based application server by J2EE, only to change the decision on the last minute by .NET. The reason being that we were Microsoft partners that were invited to try out this cool new thing called .NET, before betas were available to the press, and have our products be ".NET 1.0 ready" by launch date.

vram22 9y ago

The Java servlet API and ecosystem was quite cool at least in the early years, IMO. Very simple and elegant model, and I did some commercial work with Java servlets. There were 3-rd-party servlet engines (before they started calling them fancier names like containers after J2EE v1 started :), like LiteWebServer and JRun (good fun using them), apart from the Sun reference implementation and and more heavyweight ones like Tomcat which came a bit later, IIRC. I remember following the Tomcat mailing list for some time, and there was intense activity on it for a long time. Also used Tomcat and JBoss later in a few projects. I sometimes mention Jason Hunter's O'Reilly book "Java Servlet Programming" (1st edition) as one of the best programming books I've read, both for the content and the quality of the writing and the code examples. J2EE v1 was slow and considered by many to be over-engineered (probably why slow). Used it in one project but didn't like it. I've heard that after v3 or so (from then called JEE) it became lighter and better. Maybe others can comment on that. And from some time there have been other options like Spring, etc. Found Spring rather complex too on an initial look. What do people on here like using for Java web apps these days (those who do use it)? Heard of Wicket and Play, I know there must be others.

Joeri 9y ago
I've been using play + java 8 for the past two years. Have been quite happy with it. I did php and node.js before, and I can't say I'm missing anything in particular from those ecosystems. Build times could be a tad better, and some aspects could use more documentation, but the code is easy to write and maintain and the app is blazing fast and easy to deploy. I've gotten the same positive feedback from other web devs that joined my team. They all like it.
- vram22 9y ago
  Thanks for the info. Might check out Play. Yes, Java performance is fast. I had read that Sun had put millions of dollars into making it fast [1], hiring very qualified people to work on the compiler, the JIT engine, etc., over a period of many years. And the speed difference between early and later Java versions was perceptible. [1] Apart from the millions they also put into marketing Java to enterprises. And that worked, as we know. It became huge in the enterprise and still is.

wink 9y ago

I found it cool in the "approachble, usable" sense. At least I got a lot further than with C++. (My background at the time was purely Visual Basic and PHP). Then again I am still not a fan of C++ today :P

0x445442 9y ago

Agreed. I started with Java in 96 or 97; pretty much from the beginning. For me the big win with Java as the HTML documentation of the JDK. It meant I didn't have to grep around the file system and header files to figure out what abstractions I was meant to use. But in 2000 I started messing with other languages like Python and Perl; at which point Java became nothing more to me than tech to put food on the table.

gozur88 9y ago

By 2001 a lot of the problems java was designed to address were going away for other reasons. When it first came out it had some major advantages: It was free, so you could try it in the corporate setting without spending thousands of dollars, and your application would work on multiple operating systems without a recompile. I remember being involved in a project in which we developed and tested an application on PCs. One of our customers called up one day and asked if it worked on his linux box. "I have no idea," I said, "nobody's ever tried it." He tried it and it worked flawlessly. That doesn't seem like a big deal today with web apps, but in the late '90s it was black magic. Also, before Flash and before Javascript was good enough to build full-featured applications, pretty much the only way you were going to do an interactive web application was using java applets.

pjmlp 9y ago
I was still deep into C++ back then, Java was a sweet deal versus the pain of trying to write portable C++ with compilers trying to catch up with the ongoing work for the first version of the standard.

chrshawkes 9y ago

Exactly, back up a few years and it was still a buggy and bloated slow piece of shit. Which is the reason why Google decided to go with Python in the 90's when Java was the original language their search engine was written in.