10 ms·

IMO the real decline was Oracle. Java used to be a slowly rising language and set of platforms with benevolent oversight from SUN and at least the outlook that

IMO the real decline was Oracle. Java used to be a slowly rising language and set of platforms with benevolent oversight from SUN and at least the outlook that it was one of a few things you might want to add after Microsoft's Windows or Apple's OS (Macintosh or later OSX). Then Oracle bought SUN and everyone knew all of the good would eventually be strangled out by the lawyers and models that sought to dominate and extract for revenue control.

tmp_anon_22 5y ago
Really it was the Chrome v8 engine paving the way for electron and Single Page Applications.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  The rot set in way before Electron came along.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  It's not because of V8. It's because HTML+CSS (without even any JavaScript) is still the fastest, most effective way to build a compelling and coherent UX/UI for any platform right now. WPF (nee Avalon) was a contender in the mid-2000s, but for some reason Microsoft put it on ice by 2007 leaving the community stuck with incredibly verbose and bloated XAML markup which only made development more tedious than WinForms, which WPF was slated to replace. Microsoft's effective abandonment of *their own desktop developer story* is what enabled Electron to come along and even prompt Microsoft to use Electron for Skype, Teams, Azure Storage, and VS Code - it's utterly bizzaro-land now: almost as if the Microsoft of the mid-1990s made their own website only work in Netscape. I was at MSFT from 2012 through 2015, my observation was that the C-suite unintentionally kept OSG (Windows, etc) separate from DevDiv (Visual Studio, WPF, and all those nice cushy libraries), which led to OSG and DevDiv having to recreate each other's work and ending up with complete messes like "XAML Windows Store Apps" which turned into UWP, which no-one is took seriously because it was too limited, while Win32 is still the only real way to use Windows' "real" UI widgets. I can't explain the situation: things were dysfunctional like this long before the great layoff of 2014.
  - nimish 5y ago
    Now everyone's gone to pseudo-XAML with react JSX. Plus ca change...
  - kaba0 5y ago
    > It's because HTML+CSS (without even any JavaScript) is still the fastest, most effective way to build a compelling and coherent UX/UI for any platform right now. I would agree if you mean cross-platform, but other than for the web specifically, basically every platform has a much better way to create an app for it. The web is seriously so lacking on several trivial fronts that it is laughable, layouting being one example, but just creating a slightly modified version of a native widget like calendar require the recreation of the whole thing with quite bad primitives while goddamn WinForms could deal with it through inheritence.
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      > basically every platform has a much better way to create an app for it I accidentally spent 4 hours writing a reply to your point here and it ended up being too long for HN's comment length limit, but I posted it to pastebin: https://pastebin.com/n6AGB62L https://pastebin.com/n6AGB62L > The web is seriously so lacking on several trivial fronts that it is laughable That depends on your project's requirements. Speaking from personal experience, my main beef is that HTML web-forms still lacks a loit of widgets necessary for RAD that native UIs have had for decades, like comboboxes, true hierarchical menus, RTF or Markdown text editing (because `contenteditable` is horrible), and so on. ...however, if you're enthused enough it's very possible and quite straightforward now to create your own controls and widgets from scratch, which is what Electron apps like Slack do. Of course, when you do, you're condemned to having to maintain them for eternity, but that's a cost of doing business. > layouting being one example Actually I was going to say that's exactly where CSS outshines platforms like WPF, XAML, even Cocoa (not to mention Swing and AWT - I can't speak for JavaFX as I've never used it). I agree that for most of the past 20 years CSS has been a pain for so many layout issues ("how do I vertically center a div?" is probably the #1 question repeatedly asked on StackOverflow), but CSS's flexbox and CSS grid have been supported by all major browsers for almost a decade now and I can confidently say that I can build an aesthetic design with a layout that adapts to changing window/screen dimensions and aspect-ratios in a fraction of the time it would take me to do in any native framework. Consider that 1990s-era frameworks like VB6, WinForms, etc were all fixed-layout and required you to write your own repositioning logic in resize-event-handlers. WinForms didn't get anchored-layout until 2005! Post-2000s frameworks like Swing and WPF added layout containers, but they're far from perfect and don't support radical re-layouting. More modern frameworks that use constraint-based layout or support major relayouting (like SwiftUI and WinUI 3, to an extent) are appealing, but I find offer few real advantages over CSS's layout model. A major personal win for CSS is the content/behaviour/presentation separation (<div>-itis, not withstanding). Compared to WPF where a single XAML file will mix content, behaviour, and presentation elements, attributes, and controls without any regard for separation-of-concerns or maintainability (WPF does have CSS-esque Styles, but despite the name suggesting they're strictly presentational they're not: they're invariably used to control behaviour (due to XAML's ugly and unusable template and trigger ceremony) and also content (due to how content-based templates are used). > while goddamn WinForms could deal with it through inheritence. But that's where the failures of inheritance becomes obvious: consider WinForm's own Checkbox control. Surprisingly, the Checkbox is actually a subclass of Button, and shares no relationship with the intuitively similar Radio control despite their very similar visual appearance and behaviour. WinForms' design (like most other OOP-based frameworks) shoehorn both UX behaviour and visual appearance into a single OOP inheritance tree. This only works up-to-a-point, then things quickly fall-apart.
kaba0 5y ago
Basically, every growth figure of the language shows otherwise. Oracle is ain’t saints, but the amount of needless bashing it gets here is astonishing. Regardless of what its other branches are doing, Oracle managed to do one of the smoothest language takeovers where the (stellar) core team is virtually unchanged, the language became completely open sourced and it underwent tremendous changes which resulted in huge growths after the slowdown at the end of the Sun era. Note: I am not working at Oracle and never have.
- tomrod 5y ago
  I feel like it's warranted. The calculus seems to be evaluation of positive impact on the world as a whole versus success of transition/acquisition.
- scarmig 5y ago
  People always love to invent mythic narratives about a golden age that was betrayed by its lesser descendents. It can be the Greeks mythologizing their ancestors, Marxists bemoaning how Stalin betrayed Lenin's legacy, or Java/Solaris partisans hating on Oracle. The fact that the acquisition cast off a bunch of brilliant, distinguished, charismatic engineers who have every reason to further the mythmaking also plays into why we hear so much of it. But to give credit where it's due, it's given us this esteemable gem of a rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    Oh my God that was epic. Ellison as lawnmower is spot on.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > but the amount of needless bashing it gets here is astonishing I don't think it's needless. I'll bash Java as long as it's the language for AP computer science. Imagine a budding young programmer, bright eyed and bushy tailed, eager to get into computer science. They get to class and greet the teacher "Welcome class, let's learn about Java. There's a wide world of computers out there, but your perception of computing will be that Computing <-> Java until maybe the sophomore year of college. Have fun!" Students come to me their sophomore year of college completely awestruck. "I had not idea! I thought programming was all Java!" they tell me. Imagine that. Close your eyes and picture a world where all of programming is Java programming. How quick did you open them and splash water on your face to wake rid yourself from that nightmare? Java is singlehandedly responsible for snuffing the dream of so many young programmers. I've seen it in my own research, where kids in elemntary and middle school describe programming as fun, interesting, and challenging. That's because at this age they're using fun languages like Blockly, and they spend their time programming making and playing games. Then they get to AP computer science and they are introduced to Java. Perceptions of programming fall through the floor, with more students calling it difficult, frustrating, and scary. It's tragic what Java is doing to young people. Like, I understand we want students to have skills they will use in business, but we can't present programming to them as if all of programming is OOP enterprise development in Java. It's a crying shame.
nray 5y ago
The JRE security horrorshow might have started before the Oracle aquisition, and we wanted rid of java on the desktop for the same reason we wanted rid of flash. Apple used to advertise that only Windows suffered from viruses until their own unpatched JRE was exploited widely. Oracle contributed by making updates burdensome to download, and now unavailable without a support agreement, but what stopped java GUI apps from succeeding is at least partly the truly endless stream of remote code execution vulns if the JRE was available to the browser.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  I think you might be onto something. MS' C#, which is a near 1:1 copy of Java and what it aims to accomplish, has never suffered the same issues as Java's JRE. You have to wonder if that's because MS gets away with baking CLR updates quietly into Windows whereas JRE updates are more difficult to deploy.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    The incentives were always misaligned for a third party framework like Java, even from someone as big as Sun, and now Oracle. Java was never going to be able to keep up a reasonable native UI binding, because OS vendors were at best ambivalent and at worst actively hostile, because there was nothing in making it work that benefited them. Security without centralized platform control (e.g. Windows Update, AppStore, Play) was likewise an excercise in futility.
- rowls66 5y ago
  My understanding is that most of security defects in the JRE were related to the browser integration. The core Java sandbox was secure.
  - papercrane 5y ago
    Most of the high profile security issues have been either sandbox escapes or serialization issues. The sandbox escapes were made worse by having applets in the browser. Now that applets are not a consideration any more the sandbox (SecurityManager) isn't used very much anymore and the Java devs are looking at deprecating and removing it, so most of the sandboxing features will go away.
acdha 5y ago
It felt like that happened years before Oracle acquired Sun. Java on the desktop was a neat idea but after the early 2000s it seemed like they weren't seriously committed to it and basic needs continued to go unfilled.
michaelt 5y ago
Oracle certainly wasn't good for Java. But Java-on-the-desktop had been struggling for years before that. You either bundled a complete JVM with your application (fine if you're making a 500MB IDE, not so good for anything smaller) or you had the embarrassment of directing your users to an installer that bundled the Ask toolbar. They might even end up with the security-hole-riddled java browser plugin. And even once the user has java installed, you can't just double-click a jar file to run it. And the performance isn't anything to write home about either, if Eclipse is anything to go by. Java remains a fine choice for use on the server, of course.
- biorach 5y ago
  ...or you had the embarrassment of directing your users to an installer that bundled the Ask toolbar ....the Ask toolbar. Had happily forgotten about that. shudder
- lagerstedt 5y ago
  You are right in that desktop Java aldready was a mess when Oracle took over. And I agree that distribution was a hassle. At the time it was hard to create standalone .exe or .msi for distribution. Webstart broke so often it was impossible to use outside strictly controlled corporate environments But the bundling of Ask toolbar came about in 2013, so that was definitely Oracles doing.
- cryptos 5y ago
  In fact Oracle saved Java. Sun was struggling and Java was stagnant at the time. There was hardly any big innovation in the last years under (the) Sun. Java Modules started in the Sun age, but they didn't get it out of the door. J2EE / Java EE was also kind of dozed off. So, while Oracle is for sure not the most sympathetic company, it is good at execution.
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    Google or IBM would have been better tjam Oracle. This seems like a false choice: Oracle or nothing. Back when Java/Sun were up for grabs: 1) Google by far (they were less evil back then, I think). I mean, they would have saved money and headaches and probably a lot of distracting management meetings. 2) IBM, well ok: they did Eclipse, had their own JDK, and a lot of enterprise customers on locked platforms that could financially support the language and platform and were decent contributors to Linux. ... .... 3) Really? Oracle? It's a miracle Oracle didn't completely kill Java.
mindcrime 5y ago
I think Java's problems on the desktop started before Oracle. There were issues like the loooooonnnnnggg delay to get the "consumer JRE" out, a few too many high-profile security issues, lack of up-to-date support for various media formats (despite the existence of "JMF", Java struggled a bit in the media world back then. And probably still does). There were also shortcomings with regards to accessing peripherals as I recall, although my memory is admittedly a bit fuzzy on some of that now. That said, Oracle's legal machinations certainly didn't help matters once they took over.
ryan29 5y ago
I think JavaFX could have been more successful if they would have managed it differently. I really liked it. The JavaFX developers were all great to deal with and would help you as much as they could. One of the problems in my opinion is that once you went up the chain beyond the developers, it seemed like there were some people that didn't understand what they were doing or didn't care or possibly both. They had targets to meet (or something) and the health of the project was a secondary concern. Part of this could be seen by the messaging saying they were investing in JavaFX, mobile, etc., but most of the commits to the repo were done by a few people. I can't remember what the numbers were, but I remember being shocked and thinking that if one of the top two contributors disappeared the project would be in trouble. However, the biggest mistake in my opinion was forcing JavaFX into the JDK way too quickly. You can tell that's the type of decision that comes from the top down. They wanted to be able to say the JDK had a next generation GUI toolkit and checking that box was more important than letting the project develop in a healthy manner. Before JavaFX went into the JDK it was really easy to contribute to the project via the dedicated bug tracker and you could get quick, friendly, helpful feedback directly from the developers. Bugs were fixed and would land in the next release. After it was part of the JDK you had to use bugs.jdk.com and it became much harder to participate. Factor in JavaFX having to adhere to the JDK release schedule rather than iterating quickly like they had been and it was impossible to figure out what Oracle was trying to do. Was having JavaFX on the JDK marketing material really worth stalling the development and ruining any chance it had of becoming more popular? I still can't get my head around it. The fixation on the browser plugin and applets always confused me too. It was obvious for years they'd eventually get locked out of browsers, so I don't know why they didn't push things like Web Start a lot harder. Web Start was a pretty decent distribution system and if they had improved it to fetch JREs, like OpenWebStart does now, it would have been one of the best options at the time. To this day I'm convinced that JavaFX was a missed opportunity. I'd love to try to build an app that uses Gluon [1] stuff for direct framebuffer rendering on a Raspberry PI with Mender [2] for distribution. I think you could combine something like that with JxBrowser [3] to build a digital signage system that's much better than anything on the market, but the licensing is a huge pain and too expensive for a hobbyist project. 1. https://gluonhq.com/products/gluon-embedded/ https://gluonhq.com/products/gluon-embedded/ 2. https://mender.io https://mender.io 3. https://www.teamdev.com/jxbrowser https://www.teamdev.com/jxbrowser
api 5y ago
Same happened to MySQL. People run away screaming from anything Oracle touches.

tmp_anon_22 5y ago

Really it was the Chrome v8 engine paving the way for electron and Single Page Applications.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
The rot set in way before Electron came along.
DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
It's not because of V8. It's because HTML+CSS (without even any JavaScript) is still the fastest, most effective way to build a compelling and coherent UX/UI for any platform right now. WPF (nee Avalon) was a contender in the mid-2000s, but for some reason Microsoft put it on ice by 2007 leaving the community stuck with incredibly verbose and bloated XAML markup which only made development more tedious than WinForms, which WPF was slated to replace. Microsoft's effective abandonment of *their own desktop developer story* is what enabled Electron to come along and even prompt Microsoft to use Electron for Skype, Teams, Azure Storage, and VS Code - it's utterly bizzaro-land now: almost as if the Microsoft of the mid-1990s made their own website only work in Netscape. I was at MSFT from 2012 through 2015, my observation was that the C-suite unintentionally kept OSG (Windows, etc) separate from DevDiv (Visual Studio, WPF, and all those nice cushy libraries), which led to OSG and DevDiv having to recreate each other's work and ending up with complete messes like "XAML Windows Store Apps" which turned into UWP, which no-one is took seriously because it was too limited, while Win32 is still the only real way to use Windows' "real" UI widgets. I can't explain the situation: things were dysfunctional like this long before the great layoff of 2014.
- nimish 5y ago
  Now everyone's gone to pseudo-XAML with react JSX. Plus ca change...
- kaba0 5y ago
  > It's because HTML+CSS (without even any JavaScript) is still the fastest, most effective way to build a compelling and coherent UX/UI for any platform right now. I would agree if you mean cross-platform, but other than for the web specifically, basically every platform has a much better way to create an app for it. The web is seriously so lacking on several trivial fronts that it is laughable, layouting being one example, but just creating a slightly modified version of a native widget like calendar require the recreation of the whole thing with quite bad primitives while goddamn WinForms could deal with it through inheritence.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    > basically every platform has a much better way to create an app for it I accidentally spent 4 hours writing a reply to your point here and it ended up being too long for HN's comment length limit, but I posted it to pastebin: https://pastebin.com/n6AGB62L https://pastebin.com/n6AGB62L > The web is seriously so lacking on several trivial fronts that it is laughable That depends on your project's requirements. Speaking from personal experience, my main beef is that HTML web-forms still lacks a loit of widgets necessary for RAD that native UIs have had for decades, like comboboxes, true hierarchical menus, RTF or Markdown text editing (because `contenteditable` is horrible), and so on. ...however, if you're enthused enough it's very possible and quite straightforward now to create your own controls and widgets from scratch, which is what Electron apps like Slack do. Of course, when you do, you're condemned to having to maintain them for eternity, but that's a cost of doing business. > layouting being one example Actually I was going to say that's exactly where CSS outshines platforms like WPF, XAML, even Cocoa (not to mention Swing and AWT - I can't speak for JavaFX as I've never used it). I agree that for most of the past 20 years CSS has been a pain for so many layout issues ("how do I vertically center a div?" is probably the #1 question repeatedly asked on StackOverflow), but CSS's flexbox and CSS grid have been supported by all major browsers for almost a decade now and I can confidently say that I can build an aesthetic design with a layout that adapts to changing window/screen dimensions and aspect-ratios in a fraction of the time it would take me to do in any native framework. Consider that 1990s-era frameworks like VB6, WinForms, etc were all fixed-layout and required you to write your own repositioning logic in resize-event-handlers. WinForms didn't get anchored-layout until 2005! Post-2000s frameworks like Swing and WPF added layout containers, but they're far from perfect and don't support radical re-layouting. More modern frameworks that use constraint-based layout or support major relayouting (like SwiftUI and WinUI 3, to an extent) are appealing, but I find offer few real advantages over CSS's layout model. A major personal win for CSS is the content/behaviour/presentation separation (<div>-itis, not withstanding). Compared to WPF where a single XAML file will mix content, behaviour, and presentation elements, attributes, and controls without any regard for separation-of-concerns or maintainability (WPF does have CSS-esque Styles, but despite the name suggesting they're strictly presentational they're not: they're invariably used to control behaviour (due to XAML's ugly and unusable template and trigger ceremony) and also content (due to how content-based templates are used). > while goddamn WinForms could deal with it through inheritence. But that's where the failures of inheritance becomes obvious: consider WinForm's own Checkbox control. Surprisingly, the Checkbox is actually a subclass of Button, and shares no relationship with the intuitively similar Radio control despite their very similar visual appearance and behaviour. WinForms' design (like most other OOP-based frameworks) shoehorn both UX behaviour and visual appearance into a single OOP inheritance tree. This only works up-to-a-point, then things quickly fall-apart.

kaba0 5y ago

Basically, every growth figure of the language shows otherwise. Oracle is ain’t saints, but the amount of needless bashing it gets here is astonishing. Regardless of what its other branches are doing, Oracle managed to do one of the smoothest language takeovers where the (stellar) core team is virtually unchanged, the language became completely open sourced and it underwent tremendous changes which resulted in huge growths after the slowdown at the end of the Sun era. Note: I am not working at Oracle and never have.

tomrod 5y ago
I feel like it's warranted. The calculus seems to be evaluation of positive impact on the world as a whole versus success of transition/acquisition.
scarmig 5y ago
People always love to invent mythic narratives about a golden age that was betrayed by its lesser descendents. It can be the Greeks mythologizing their ancestors, Marxists bemoaning how Stalin betrayed Lenin's legacy, or Java/Solaris partisans hating on Oracle. The fact that the acquisition cast off a bunch of brilliant, distinguished, charismatic engineers who have every reason to further the mythmaking also plays into why we hear so much of it. But to give credit where it's due, it's given us this esteemable gem of a rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Oh my God that was epic. Ellison as lawnmower is spot on.
ModernMech 5y ago
> but the amount of needless bashing it gets here is astonishing I don't think it's needless. I'll bash Java as long as it's the language for AP computer science. Imagine a budding young programmer, bright eyed and bushy tailed, eager to get into computer science. They get to class and greet the teacher "Welcome class, let's learn about Java. There's a wide world of computers out there, but your perception of computing will be that Computing <-> Java until maybe the sophomore year of college. Have fun!" Students come to me their sophomore year of college completely awestruck. "I had not idea! I thought programming was all Java!" they tell me. Imagine that. Close your eyes and picture a world where all of programming is Java programming. How quick did you open them and splash water on your face to wake rid yourself from that nightmare? Java is singlehandedly responsible for snuffing the dream of so many young programmers. I've seen it in my own research, where kids in elemntary and middle school describe programming as fun, interesting, and challenging. That's because at this age they're using fun languages like Blockly, and they spend their time programming making and playing games. Then they get to AP computer science and they are introduced to Java. Perceptions of programming fall through the floor, with more students calling it difficult, frustrating, and scary. It's tragic what Java is doing to young people. Like, I understand we want students to have skills they will use in business, but we can't present programming to them as if all of programming is OOP enterprise development in Java. It's a crying shame.

nray 5y ago

The JRE security horrorshow might have started before the Oracle aquisition, and we wanted rid of java on the desktop for the same reason we wanted rid of flash. Apple used to advertise that only Windows suffered from viruses until their own unpatched JRE was exploited widely. Oracle contributed by making updates burdensome to download, and now unavailable without a support agreement, but what stopped java GUI apps from succeeding is at least partly the truly endless stream of remote code execution vulns if the JRE was available to the browser.

jimbob45 5y ago
I think you might be onto something. MS' C#, which is a near 1:1 copy of Java and what it aims to accomplish, has never suffered the same issues as Java's JRE. You have to wonder if that's because MS gets away with baking CLR updates quietly into Windows whereas JRE updates are more difficult to deploy.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  The incentives were always misaligned for a third party framework like Java, even from someone as big as Sun, and now Oracle. Java was never going to be able to keep up a reasonable native UI binding, because OS vendors were at best ambivalent and at worst actively hostile, because there was nothing in making it work that benefited them. Security without centralized platform control (e.g. Windows Update, AppStore, Play) was likewise an excercise in futility.
rowls66 5y ago
My understanding is that most of security defects in the JRE were related to the browser integration. The core Java sandbox was secure.
- papercrane 5y ago
  Most of the high profile security issues have been either sandbox escapes or serialization issues. The sandbox escapes were made worse by having applets in the browser. Now that applets are not a consideration any more the sandbox (SecurityManager) isn't used very much anymore and the Java devs are looking at deprecating and removing it, so most of the sandboxing features will go away.

acdha 5y ago

It felt like that happened years before Oracle acquired Sun. Java on the desktop was a neat idea but after the early 2000s it seemed like they weren't seriously committed to it and basic needs continued to go unfilled.

michaelt 5y ago

Oracle certainly wasn't good for Java. But Java-on-the-desktop had been struggling for years before that. You either bundled a complete JVM with your application (fine if you're making a 500MB IDE, not so good for anything smaller) or you had the embarrassment of directing your users to an installer that bundled the Ask toolbar. They might even end up with the security-hole-riddled java browser plugin. And even once the user has java installed, you can't just double-click a jar file to run it. And the performance isn't anything to write home about either, if Eclipse is anything to go by. Java remains a fine choice for use on the server, of course.

biorach 5y ago
...or you had the embarrassment of directing your users to an installer that bundled the Ask toolbar ....the Ask toolbar. Had happily forgotten about that. shudder
lagerstedt 5y ago
You are right in that desktop Java aldready was a mess when Oracle took over. And I agree that distribution was a hassle. At the time it was hard to create standalone .exe or .msi for distribution. Webstart broke so often it was impossible to use outside strictly controlled corporate environments But the bundling of Ask toolbar came about in 2013, so that was definitely Oracles doing.
cryptos 5y ago
In fact Oracle saved Java. Sun was struggling and Java was stagnant at the time. There was hardly any big innovation in the last years under (the) Sun. Java Modules started in the Sun age, but they didn't get it out of the door. J2EE / Java EE was also kind of dozed off. So, while Oracle is for sure not the most sympathetic company, it is good at execution.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Google or IBM would have been better tjam Oracle. This seems like a false choice: Oracle or nothing. Back when Java/Sun were up for grabs: 1) Google by far (they were less evil back then, I think). I mean, they would have saved money and headaches and probably a lot of distracting management meetings. 2) IBM, well ok: they did Eclipse, had their own JDK, and a lot of enterprise customers on locked platforms that could financially support the language and platform and were decent contributors to Linux. ... .... 3) Really? Oracle? It's a miracle Oracle didn't completely kill Java.

mindcrime 5y ago

I think Java's problems on the desktop started before Oracle. There were issues like the loooooonnnnnggg delay to get the "consumer JRE" out, a few too many high-profile security issues, lack of up-to-date support for various media formats (despite the existence of "JMF", Java struggled a bit in the media world back then. And probably still does). There were also shortcomings with regards to accessing peripherals as I recall, although my memory is admittedly a bit fuzzy on some of that now. That said, Oracle's legal machinations certainly didn't help matters once they took over.

ryan29 5y ago

I think JavaFX could have been more successful if they would have managed it differently. I really liked it. The JavaFX developers were all great to deal with and would help you as much as they could. One of the problems in my opinion is that once you went up the chain beyond the developers, it seemed like there were some people that didn't understand what they were doing or didn't care or possibly both. They had targets to meet (or something) and the health of the project was a secondary concern. Part of this could be seen by the messaging saying they were investing in JavaFX, mobile, etc., but most of the commits to the repo were done by a few people. I can't remember what the numbers were, but I remember being shocked and thinking that if one of the top two contributors disappeared the project would be in trouble. However, the biggest mistake in my opinion was forcing JavaFX into the JDK way too quickly. You can tell that's the type of decision that comes from the top down. They wanted to be able to say the JDK had a next generation GUI toolkit and checking that box was more important than letting the project develop in a healthy manner. Before JavaFX went into the JDK it was really easy to contribute to the project via the dedicated bug tracker and you could get quick, friendly, helpful feedback directly from the developers. Bugs were fixed and would land in the next release. After it was part of the JDK you had to use bugs.jdk.com and it became much harder to participate. Factor in JavaFX having to adhere to the JDK release schedule rather than iterating quickly like they had been and it was impossible to figure out what Oracle was trying to do. Was having JavaFX on the JDK marketing material really worth stalling the development and ruining any chance it had of becoming more popular? I still can't get my head around it. The fixation on the browser plugin and applets always confused me too. It was obvious for years they'd eventually get locked out of browsers, so I don't know why they didn't push things like Web Start a lot harder. Web Start was a pretty decent distribution system and if they had improved it to fetch JREs, like OpenWebStart does now, it would have been one of the best options at the time. To this day I'm convinced that JavaFX was a missed opportunity. I'd love to try to build an app that uses Gluon [1] stuff for direct framebuffer rendering on a Raspberry PI with Mender [2] for distribution. I think you could combine something like that with JxBrowser [3] to build a digital signage system that's much better than anything on the market, but the licensing is a huge pain and too expensive for a hobbyist project. 1. https://gluonhq.com/products/gluon-embedded/ https://gluonhq.com/products/gluon-embedded/ 2. https://mender.io https://mender.io 3. https://www.teamdev.com/jxbrowser https://www.teamdev.com/jxbrowser

api 5y ago

Same happened to MySQL. People run away screaming from anything Oracle touches.