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I think what he means is that these were literally the same promises that were made about Java and the web back in the early 1990’s. Java was the solution that

I think what he means is that these were literally the same promises that were made about Java and the web back in the early 1990’s. Java was the solution that would provide a robust, symmetric (server+client), secure, highly capable, and portable platform for complex web applications. Early Java folk weep because Java failed so badly on the client, and something else is stepping in to do what Java could not.

pjmlp 8y ago
Java has been quite successful on my client devices running on my pocket, TV and tablets. Also on client devices running on my credit card, factory management client screens and couple of car infotainment systems. And on client devices across many corporations still safe from Electron madness.
- olliej 8y ago
  Java applets are how a depressingly large amount of CC processing happens. (I think Java Card maybe? is responsible for CC handling in all the magic CC features in phones)
olliej 8y ago
Sorry, which point were you referring to? (I recognize the article as bad, I'm just not sure which problem you're referring to :D )
- regularfry 8y ago
  I think the article author knows exactly what they're doing. "Write once, run anywhere" was literally Java's strapline.
neilv 8y ago
Thank you for clarifying that. Also, one thing less-known than that Java applets were in the popular Web browsers at one point (when JavaScript was said to be just a glue language to invoke the Java applet), was that Sun already had a richer, Java-centric Web browser, which used Java for content-type handlers. Imagine providing content as data of some type/format, and the browser would automatically download an appropriate UI for that type, on the fly, and integrate it into UI, and it would all be secure. (I first saw Java when it was called Oak, and Sun had great people doing major things, Java only one of them. When Java applets first hit conventional Web browsers, most people thought they were for replacing animated GIFs, thanks to a demo program. I probably wrote some of the first Java desktop application code outside of Sun, partly to demonstrate that Java was a real applications development language. Well, the language was there, and in many ways a huge improvement over the C++ that most shrinkwrap and technical desktop application developers were moving to, though the library support took a while to catch up, and performance took longer.)
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  You mention it in your last sentence, but most of these tales forget to mention it at all: java was slow. I mean, slooooooooooooooow. And that reputation stuck for much longer than it was actually true. Java applets were an abomination and you wanted to repeatedly stab yourself in the head while using even a simple one. On a then-average p166 with 24mb of ram, your browser would go unresponsive while loading, jumpy mouse cursor, os starting to swap, and then some irregular annoying hangs while the GC did its thing. Not to mention how ugly awt and swing looked even back then. Modern web is a joke regarding resource usage and complexity etc., but java was a shitshow in practice, except on beefy servers.
  - 0815test 8y ago
    > On a then-average p166 with 24mb of ram, your browser would go unresponsive while loading, jumpy mouse cursor, os starting to swap, and then some irregular annoying hangs while the GC did its thing. Reminds me of client-side JS frameworks. Or Electron apps. > Not to mention how ugly awt and swing looked even back then. Web UI is still as ugly as ever, of course. Peak UX usability was native UIs in the 1990s and early 2000s, after that it was nothing but steady decline.
    - TimTheTinker 8y ago
      > Reminds me of client-side JS frameworks. Or Electron apps. Even big framework web apps on a core 2 duo running old Firefox, that is nowhere as bad as early Java trying to run something as a web applet. I remember staring at that crazy Java applet load spinner and hating Java, and this was already in the early 2000s (on the first white iBook running Mac OS 9). It would have been much worse 7 years earlier. It was really just the JVM’s startup time and the clunky AWT-based UI that made Java lose on web clients. Flash easily dethroned Java there because it started almost instantaneously and could do fancy animations (recall dial-up speeds meant video wasn’t an option).
      - that_jojo 8y ago
dragonwriter 8y ago
> I think what he means is that these were literally the same promises that were made about Java and the web back in the early 1990’s. And as a whole (except for run in browser without plugin, which was never promised, AFAIR), they were all true or Java, relatively speaking, compared to what was available before.

pjmlp 8y ago

Java has been quite successful on my client devices running on my pocket, TV and tablets. Also on client devices running on my credit card, factory management client screens and couple of car infotainment systems. And on client devices across many corporations still safe from Electron madness.

olliej 8y ago
Java applets are how a depressingly large amount of CC processing happens. (I think Java Card maybe? is responsible for CC handling in all the magic CC features in phones)

olliej 8y ago

Sorry, which point were you referring to? (I recognize the article as bad, I'm just not sure which problem you're referring to :D )

regularfry 8y ago
I think the article author knows exactly what they're doing. "Write once, run anywhere" was literally Java's strapline.

neilv 8y ago

Thank you for clarifying that. Also, one thing less-known than that Java applets were in the popular Web browsers at one point (when JavaScript was said to be just a glue language to invoke the Java applet), was that Sun already had a richer, Java-centric Web browser, which used Java for content-type handlers. Imagine providing content as data of some type/format, and the browser would automatically download an appropriate UI for that type, on the fly, and integrate it into UI, and it would all be secure. (I first saw Java when it was called Oak, and Sun had great people doing major things, Java only one of them. When Java applets first hit conventional Web browsers, most people thought they were for replacing animated GIFs, thanks to a demo program. I probably wrote some of the first Java desktop application code outside of Sun, partly to demonstrate that Java was a real applications development language. Well, the language was there, and in many ways a huge improvement over the C++ that most shrinkwrap and technical desktop application developers were moving to, though the library support took a while to catch up, and performance took longer.)

iforgotpassword 8y ago
You mention it in your last sentence, but most of these tales forget to mention it at all: java was slow. I mean, slooooooooooooooow. And that reputation stuck for much longer than it was actually true. Java applets were an abomination and you wanted to repeatedly stab yourself in the head while using even a simple one. On a then-average p166 with 24mb of ram, your browser would go unresponsive while loading, jumpy mouse cursor, os starting to swap, and then some irregular annoying hangs while the GC did its thing. Not to mention how ugly awt and swing looked even back then. Modern web is a joke regarding resource usage and complexity etc., but java was a shitshow in practice, except on beefy servers.
- 0815test 8y ago
  > On a then-average p166 with 24mb of ram, your browser would go unresponsive while loading, jumpy mouse cursor, os starting to swap, and then some irregular annoying hangs while the GC did its thing. Reminds me of client-side JS frameworks. Or Electron apps. > Not to mention how ugly awt and swing looked even back then. Web UI is still as ugly as ever, of course. Peak UX usability was native UIs in the 1990s and early 2000s, after that it was nothing but steady decline.
  - TimTheTinker 8y ago
    > Reminds me of client-side JS frameworks. Or Electron apps. Even big framework web apps on a core 2 duo running old Firefox, that is nowhere as bad as early Java trying to run something as a web applet. I remember staring at that crazy Java applet load spinner and hating Java, and this was already in the early 2000s (on the first white iBook running Mac OS 9). It would have been much worse 7 years earlier. It was really just the JVM’s startup time and the clunky AWT-based UI that made Java lose on web clients. Flash easily dethroned Java there because it started almost instantaneously and could do fancy animations (recall dial-up speeds meant video wasn’t an option).
    - that_jojo 8y ago

dragonwriter 8y ago

> I think what he means is that these were literally the same promises that were made about Java and the web back in the early 1990’s. And as a whole (except for run in browser without plugin, which was never promised, AFAIR), they were all true or Java, relatively speaking, compared to what was available before.