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You can thank Sun Microsystems for this. They had the world in the palm of their hand with HotJava, but decided to abandon it. If they had continued, Java woul
by lenkite 2y ago
You can thank Sun Microsystems for this. They had the world in the palm of their hand with HotJava, but decided to abandon it. If they had continued, Java would been the language of choice for the web and they likely wouldn't have been acquired by Oracle.
- jfengel 2y agoHotJava, IIRC, was more focused on Swing apps. Swing just wasn't the right thing for users; the HTML DOM turns out to be more comfortable. Even though it means sometimes failing out to the Canvas, which gives you nothing. NB: I was very distantly part of the Swing team. I did early reviews of its design documents.
- lenkite 2y agoConsidering we have full replacement frameworks like React, Flutter, etc built as DOM replacements, I would say Swing was definitely the right thing for users. Probably could have offered an "easy markup enhancement" library for plain documents, but anything extensively dynamic should be written with a proper UI framework.
- agumonkey 2y agoIt's a hard sell for the majority of users and the mainstream market at the time. Flash apps had cute, lazy loaded, ~lightweight, animated mini apps. Anything java at the time was heavy, enterprisey, requiring more setup to get blocky GUIs that didn't do much.