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> Java and JVM's WORA "Write Once Run Anywhere" will kill Microsoft's Evil Empire because it will render Windows irrelevant. There was the sentiment but this d

> Java and JVM's WORA "Write Once Run Anywhere" will kill Microsoft's Evil Empire because it will render Windows irrelevant. There was the sentiment but this doesn’t fully capture what the hype was about. Java out of the gate had Suns network vision built in via jndi, rmi and object serialization. The hype was about moving applications onto the network and off of windows or any particular vendors OS. And this did come to pass, just not how Sun was selling it with Java. For example; Office, Microsoft’s crown jewel and anchor into a lot organizations is now almost entirely web based.

zozbot234 1y ago
> Java out of the gate had Suns network vision built in via jndi, rmi and object serialization. It's kind of obvious since having a standard, platform-neutral virtual machine doesn't just enable WORA; it enables sending binary code and program state over the network, which is quite handy for all sorts of distributed computing flows. We'll probably do the same things using Wasm components once that tech stack becomes established.
ndiddy 1y ago
I think the "move applications onto the network" idea basically killed Java on the desktop and relegated it to a backend only language. It wasn't a bad idea, but it was too early. Because of the focus on network distribution, the two main ways to distribute desktop Java software were Java WebStart (lengthy start-up times on early 2000s internet speeds, integrated poorly with your OS) and applets (only viable for corporate environments where the IT department had control over the whole network and all the clients on it due to security problems, no integration with your OS). If you had to distribute software that ran locally, you had to roll your own solution or buy some third-party tool since Sun didn't have anything that made this easy.
hedora 1y ago
It didn’t really come to pass. Office web is comically slow, even when I have $5K of machines a 100ish GB of DRAM laying around my house. In the java vision, it’d transparently offload to that network of machines. Also, the user could decide not to offload to untrusted hardware (e.g., I don’t want to trust Microsoft’s cloud compute).
breve 1y ago
> And this did come to pass, just not how Sun was selling it with Java. For example; Office, Microsoft’s crown jewel and anchor into a lot organizations is now almost entirely web based. But this will come full circle with the transition to WebAssembly. WebAssembly is like Java applets but it has the advantage of being built into the browser with nothing extra to install. Google switched the calculation engine of Google Sheets to WebAssembly (rewriting it in Java as it happens) and got double the performance versus JavaScript: https://web.dev/case-studies/google-sheets-wasmgc https://web.dev/case-studies/google-sheets-wasmgc

zozbot234 1y ago

> Java out of the gate had Suns network vision built in via jndi, rmi and object serialization. It's kind of obvious since having a standard, platform-neutral virtual machine doesn't just enable WORA; it enables sending binary code and program state over the network, which is quite handy for all sorts of distributed computing flows. We'll probably do the same things using Wasm components once that tech stack becomes established.

ndiddy 1y ago

I think the "move applications onto the network" idea basically killed Java on the desktop and relegated it to a backend only language. It wasn't a bad idea, but it was too early. Because of the focus on network distribution, the two main ways to distribute desktop Java software were Java WebStart (lengthy start-up times on early 2000s internet speeds, integrated poorly with your OS) and applets (only viable for corporate environments where the IT department had control over the whole network and all the clients on it due to security problems, no integration with your OS). If you had to distribute software that ran locally, you had to roll your own solution or buy some third-party tool since Sun didn't have anything that made this easy.

hedora 1y ago

It didn’t really come to pass. Office web is comically slow, even when I have $5K of machines a 100ish GB of DRAM laying around my house. In the java vision, it’d transparently offload to that network of machines. Also, the user could decide not to offload to untrusted hardware (e.g., I don’t want to trust Microsoft’s cloud compute).

breve 1y ago

> And this did come to pass, just not how Sun was selling it with Java. For example; Office, Microsoft’s crown jewel and anchor into a lot organizations is now almost entirely web based. But this will come full circle with the transition to WebAssembly. WebAssembly is like Java applets but it has the advantage of being built into the browser with nothing extra to install. Google switched the calculation engine of Google Sheets to WebAssembly (rewriting it in Java as it happens) and got double the performance versus JavaScript: https://web.dev/case-studies/google-sheets-wasmgc https://web.dev/case-studies/google-sheets-wasmgc