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>If only we could get a new version of Java for the browser. Something more of a scripting language that is not compiled but interpreted. Could probably knock o

>If only we could get a new version of Java for the browser. Something more of a scripting language that is not compiled but interpreted. Could probably knock out a proof of concept in a week, might call it Javascript or something... I get the joke. It is sad though how Java didn't end up being the ubiquitous runtime for browsers... It started off so promising... Compiling source to byte code is really fast in Java (and modern browsers generally do much more work compiling JavaScript). Even if the browser downloaded source code (and why not? --byte code is so much more compact and faster to parse), you wouldn't even notice the compiling down to bytecode step. It's amazing how badly the Java ball got dropped.

zmmmmm 3y ago
> It's amazing how badly the Java ball got dropped. It still boggles my mind that Sun Microsystems fully owned the tech for the only ubiquitous browser plugin for full fledged applications with > 95% deployment and somehow screwed it up and went out of business a few years later. Despite all their engineering prowess it seems like they just couldn't make Java work seamlessly and smoothly. I'd like to think it was just a hard engineering challenge, but as someone who went all in on Java WebStart for deployment at one point and then watched them take it from a highly attractive platform to actively ruining it within a few years, I have to attribute it more to incompetence.
- cbsmith 3y ago
  I worked at Sun during that time period, and as much as they liked to pretend they were a software business, they were a hardware business whose primary feature was software, which is really, really not the same thing. They never really figured out how to be in the software business if it wasn't in service of selling hardware. Such an amazing fail.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  I graduated college around that time. Microsoft held an event on campus that took two hours, explaining how great it is to work at Microsoft. A month later Sun came to campus and spent two hours telling us how awful Microsoft is and we shouldn't have anything to do with them. What they didn't do was tell us why we should want to work for Sun. On a larger scale, Sun did seem to lose focus and concentrate too much on getting Microsoft back for making a faster and more stable JVM. What they didn't do was come up with improvements that users wanted. At least not at the rate they should have.
  - cbsmith 3y ago
    Yeah, Sun stock really soared when they started going after Microsoft, but I kept pointing out that the valuation was from the distorted perception where they looked bigger because they were taking on a big foe. It was a sugar high that was obviously going to come crashing down if they weren't focused on delivering a better product.
- NBJack 3y ago
  I recall those days. To be fair, it was asking a lot of the hardware at the time to run both a browser and Java itself. I also recall the JVM had painfully slow start times that weren't rectified for years. These were also largely the 1.x versions of the language to boot. On top of it all, Java integration was really just an excuse to plop a grossly out of place app UI in the browser window. Would have been much better if we could have had deeper behind the scene integration with the DOM layer.
  - cbsmith 3y ago
    HotJava was pretty much proof that you could have Java well integrated into the browser. If you can do the browser entirely in Java and run applets smoothly, then there is no reason why a "better" browser runtime/implementation couldn't be even smoother. The problem was that the browsers were busy loading up on every feature they could (including JavaScript) while also providing Java runtimes that would load after the fact (and the Java load times were often much better than the browser load times, but since the Java runtime load was deferred, it was a much more painful experience). You could keep browsers lightweight by doing much of the stuff browsers were doing into Java, but the problem with that is that the browsers were in a race to differentiate from each other, and the whole point of Java was that the experience was uniform. So instead we got a rush of poorly considered browser capabilities that we were stuck with for an extremely long time. I can't blame the browser makers... Sun never came up with a business proposition for them that encouraged focusing on a better Java experience.

zmmmmm 3y ago

> It's amazing how badly the Java ball got dropped. It still boggles my mind that Sun Microsystems fully owned the tech for the only ubiquitous browser plugin for full fledged applications with > 95% deployment and somehow screwed it up and went out of business a few years later. Despite all their engineering prowess it seems like they just couldn't make Java work seamlessly and smoothly. I'd like to think it was just a hard engineering challenge, but as someone who went all in on Java WebStart for deployment at one point and then watched them take it from a highly attractive platform to actively ruining it within a few years, I have to attribute it more to incompetence.

cbsmith 3y ago
I worked at Sun during that time period, and as much as they liked to pretend they were a software business, they were a hardware business whose primary feature was software, which is really, really not the same thing. They never really figured out how to be in the software business if it wasn't in service of selling hardware. Such an amazing fail.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
I graduated college around that time. Microsoft held an event on campus that took two hours, explaining how great it is to work at Microsoft. A month later Sun came to campus and spent two hours telling us how awful Microsoft is and we shouldn't have anything to do with them. What they didn't do was tell us why we should want to work for Sun. On a larger scale, Sun did seem to lose focus and concentrate too much on getting Microsoft back for making a faster and more stable JVM. What they didn't do was come up with improvements that users wanted. At least not at the rate they should have.
- cbsmith 3y ago
  Yeah, Sun stock really soared when they started going after Microsoft, but I kept pointing out that the valuation was from the distorted perception where they looked bigger because they were taking on a big foe. It was a sugar high that was obviously going to come crashing down if they weren't focused on delivering a better product.
NBJack 3y ago
I recall those days. To be fair, it was asking a lot of the hardware at the time to run both a browser and Java itself. I also recall the JVM had painfully slow start times that weren't rectified for years. These were also largely the 1.x versions of the language to boot. On top of it all, Java integration was really just an excuse to plop a grossly out of place app UI in the browser window. Would have been much better if we could have had deeper behind the scene integration with the DOM layer.
- cbsmith 3y ago
  HotJava was pretty much proof that you could have Java well integrated into the browser. If you can do the browser entirely in Java and run applets smoothly, then there is no reason why a "better" browser runtime/implementation couldn't be even smoother. The problem was that the browsers were busy loading up on every feature they could (including JavaScript) while also providing Java runtimes that would load after the fact (and the Java load times were often much better than the browser load times, but since the Java runtime load was deferred, it was a much more painful experience). You could keep browsers lightweight by doing much of the stuff browsers were doing into Java, but the problem with that is that the browsers were in a race to differentiate from each other, and the whole point of Java was that the experience was uniform. So instead we got a rush of poorly considered browser capabilities that we were stuck with for an extremely long time. I can't blame the browser makers... Sun never came up with a business proposition for them that encouraged focusing on a better Java experience.