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On the contrary, please continue. Improve it by adding BonziBuddy and friends. Please please please ruin your already non-existent reputation, Oracle. Help ordi

by tobiasu 14y ago

On the contrary, please continue. Improve it by adding BonziBuddy and friends. Please please please ruin your already non-existent reputation, Oracle. Help ordinary people who have no idea what Oracle is, connect your name with spam and spyware (and security problems, ofc).

tatsuke95 14y ago
Hear, hear. Oracle has the right to bundle whatever crap-ware they want. If that sullies their reputation or draws out alternatives, that's a good thing.
- jtheory 14y ago
  Can we just wait until real alternatives exist before letting client-side Java completely self-destruct? My problem is that as of now, they don't.
  - tracker1 14y ago
    You mean besides Python, .Net and a host of other runtime environments that are cross platform and run with minimal effort without being distributed with shovel-ware? As for .Net, I've found Mono to be pretty easy to target for as a cross-platform runtime. The browser plugin has itself now surpassed Flash and Acrobat as a consistent exploit point and security weakness... On that front, quite a number of browsers can accomplish most of what Java is and has been used for in the browser with JS.
    - jtheory 14y ago
      Cross-platform development is in a better place now than it was when Java first tried to tackle that challenge. I'm not a huge fan of maintaining installed software, though -- if you have a silent auto-updater, that's not bad, but otherwise you're going to be either annoying people with frequent updates, or supporting (often accidentally) scores of old versions all the time. What else is there besides Java that can run in the browser and do audio recording, MIDI input, realtime audio DSP, etc.? Obviously not everyone wants fancy audio capabilities in the browser, but I imagine there are plenty of other "niche" capabilities that other people need that are impossible in the browser w/o Java. I do get a sense now that we're going to see the Java security hole largely closed (thanks to browser limitations and Oracle fixes), but the damage has certainly been done.
glogla 14y ago
I think Gator might be a good choice too.
monochromatic 14y ago
Ordinary people won't notice.
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  That's fine. Ordinary people never really realized how irritating Adobe was being about Flash, either, but that wasn't really a big deal because it was ultimately Flash's poor reputation among techies that brought it down. Similarly, I think Java's worst nightmare scenario wouldn't be end users deciding they don't like it. (Heck, like with Flash most of them don't even know when they're using it.) It would be some massive headline-making Java-related security breach at a Fortune 500 company convincing IT departments around the world to start thinking that it's time to migrate to a less risky platform.
  - drzaiusapelord 14y ago
    >it was ultimately Flash's poor reputation among techies that brought it down. Sorry, but techie's opinions are overrated. iOS and mobile video brought Flash down a few notches, not us.
    - yakiv 14y ago
      I've heard that Steve Jobs hated Flash (or Adobe). Whatever his reasons were, a techie's opinion maybe did help bring Flash down a few notches.
  - josephlord 14y ago
    I'm not sure it was a general view amongst techies that did for Flash I think it was those in Apple (not necessarily techies) who made or influenced the decision not to support it in iOS that brought it down. At the time that looked like a big gamble but with hindsight the gamble has paid off for everybody but Adobe and Flash developers.
VexXtreme 14y ago
I would love to see that. Java really deserves to die a death at this point.
- sc0rb 14y ago
  Here we go again, another Java hater for no reason. What should we replace it with? someCrap.js? someOtherCrap.py? You really have no idea what you're talking about. Killing Java would be a ridiculous thing to do. You live in such a bubble.
  - VexXtreme 14y ago
    I work with Java every day. Java and Spring pay my bills at the moment but that doesn't lessen my contempt for the platform. Overly amateurish nature of the community/ecosystem is a huge issue when you are building enterprise level applications (but have no choice really, because it is your company's technology of choice - usually because they are too cheap to pay for decent dev tools). The whole community is full of de facto "standards" and half baked libraries which are usually results of someone's summer project. The language in and of itself is alright (although massively outdated compared to more modern alternatives like C#), but the virtual machine and the nature of the ecosystem make me want to blow my brains out on daily basis. Don't even get me started on the recent security debacle. I don't know a lot about these new *.js technologies but if they are right tools for the job, then yes, I wouldn't have anything against using them where appropriate.
    - unoti 14y ago
      You said some insightful and interesting things there, but two things in particular are most striking: 1) You have no choice. 2) You don't know about new technologies. I sense a potential roadmap for you here! Start learning, build something to show people you've learned, and start looking. Whenever you feel trapped, you're becoming obsolete. Don't be a victim, be a conqueror.
    - pron 14y ago
      So, do you mean Java or the JVM? Because here we're talking about the JVM; that means Java, Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, Scala etc. Sometimes the JVM isn't the right tool; Java the language is often the wrong tool. But when you need to write large, high-performance, backend software, the JVM is pretty much the only rational choice. C/C++ is too expensive effort-wise, in development, in maintenance and in monitoring. Erlang is awesome, but it's too slow for some things. .Net is not robust on non-windows platforms (I'm not sure about this, but this is the common perception). Go is slower than Java, lacks the huge ecosystem, and also doesn't provide all the JVM goodies like runtime instrumentation and profiling, hot code swapping, good monitoring etc. Rust is too immature (and won't give you those benefits either). So, pretty often, the JVM is the only choice and you think it's time to kill it?

by tobiasu 14y ago

tatsuke95 14y ago

Hear, hear. Oracle has the right to bundle whatever crap-ware they want. If that sullies their reputation or draws out alternatives, that's a good thing.

jtheory 14y ago
Can we just wait until real alternatives exist before letting client-side Java completely self-destruct? My problem is that as of now, they don't.
- tracker1 14y ago
  You mean besides Python, .Net and a host of other runtime environments that are cross platform and run with minimal effort without being distributed with shovel-ware? As for .Net, I've found Mono to be pretty easy to target for as a cross-platform runtime. The browser plugin has itself now surpassed Flash and Acrobat as a consistent exploit point and security weakness... On that front, quite a number of browsers can accomplish most of what Java is and has been used for in the browser with JS.
  - jtheory 14y ago
    Cross-platform development is in a better place now than it was when Java first tried to tackle that challenge. I'm not a huge fan of maintaining installed software, though -- if you have a silent auto-updater, that's not bad, but otherwise you're going to be either annoying people with frequent updates, or supporting (often accidentally) scores of old versions all the time. What else is there besides Java that can run in the browser and do audio recording, MIDI input, realtime audio DSP, etc.? Obviously not everyone wants fancy audio capabilities in the browser, but I imagine there are plenty of other "niche" capabilities that other people need that are impossible in the browser w/o Java. I do get a sense now that we're going to see the Java security hole largely closed (thanks to browser limitations and Oracle fixes), but the damage has certainly been done.

glogla 14y ago

I think Gator might be a good choice too.

monochromatic 14y ago

Ordinary people won't notice.

bunderbunder 14y ago
That's fine. Ordinary people never really realized how irritating Adobe was being about Flash, either, but that wasn't really a big deal because it was ultimately Flash's poor reputation among techies that brought it down. Similarly, I think Java's worst nightmare scenario wouldn't be end users deciding they don't like it. (Heck, like with Flash most of them don't even know when they're using it.) It would be some massive headline-making Java-related security breach at a Fortune 500 company convincing IT departments around the world to start thinking that it's time to migrate to a less risky platform.
- drzaiusapelord 14y ago
  >it was ultimately Flash's poor reputation among techies that brought it down. Sorry, but techie's opinions are overrated. iOS and mobile video brought Flash down a few notches, not us.
  - yakiv 14y ago
    I've heard that Steve Jobs hated Flash (or Adobe). Whatever his reasons were, a techie's opinion maybe did help bring Flash down a few notches.
- josephlord 14y ago
  I'm not sure it was a general view amongst techies that did for Flash I think it was those in Apple (not necessarily techies) who made or influenced the decision not to support it in iOS that brought it down. At the time that looked like a big gamble but with hindsight the gamble has paid off for everybody but Adobe and Flash developers.

VexXtreme 14y ago

I would love to see that. Java really deserves to die a death at this point.

sc0rb 14y ago
Here we go again, another Java hater for no reason. What should we replace it with? someCrap.js? someOtherCrap.py? You really have no idea what you're talking about. Killing Java would be a ridiculous thing to do. You live in such a bubble.
- VexXtreme 14y ago
  I work with Java every day. Java and Spring pay my bills at the moment but that doesn't lessen my contempt for the platform. Overly amateurish nature of the community/ecosystem is a huge issue when you are building enterprise level applications (but have no choice really, because it is your company's technology of choice - usually because they are too cheap to pay for decent dev tools). The whole community is full of de facto "standards" and half baked libraries which are usually results of someone's summer project. The language in and of itself is alright (although massively outdated compared to more modern alternatives like C#), but the virtual machine and the nature of the ecosystem make me want to blow my brains out on daily basis. Don't even get me started on the recent security debacle. I don't know a lot about these new *.js technologies but if they are right tools for the job, then yes, I wouldn't have anything against using them where appropriate.
  - unoti 14y ago
    You said some insightful and interesting things there, but two things in particular are most striking: 1) You have no choice. 2) You don't know about new technologies. I sense a potential roadmap for you here! Start learning, build something to show people you've learned, and start looking. Whenever you feel trapped, you're becoming obsolete. Don't be a victim, be a conqueror.
  - pron 14y ago
    So, do you mean Java or the JVM? Because here we're talking about the JVM; that means Java, Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, Scala etc. Sometimes the JVM isn't the right tool; Java the language is often the wrong tool. But when you need to write large, high-performance, backend software, the JVM is pretty much the only rational choice. C/C++ is too expensive effort-wise, in development, in maintenance and in monitoring. Erlang is awesome, but it's too slow for some things. .Net is not robust on non-windows platforms (I'm not sure about this, but this is the common perception). Go is slower than Java, lacks the huge ecosystem, and also doesn't provide all the JVM goodies like runtime instrumentation and profiling, hot code swapping, good monitoring etc. Rust is too immature (and won't give you those benefits either). So, pretty often, the JVM is the only choice and you think it's time to kill it?