4 ms·

Ask HN: what are some software technologies which have come and gone away?

• arkitaip 14y ago
  Applets. Shockwave. jQuery made low-level DOM manipulation more or less obsolete. So much of server side Java has been abandon for more lightweight alternatives that don't suffer from XMLitis and layers and layers of abstraction.
  • eranation 14y ago
    Sadly, very sadly, there is more server side Java code written each day than Ruby, Django, Node combined (I know, citation needed, don't have one, call it a hunch). Think of all the enterprise businesses, banks, corporations, insurance companies, wall street, healthcare IT, RCM, ERP etc - all the enterprise world still runs Spring, Hibernate, JSF, etc. So it might not be popular in Silicon Valley, but open the jobs at indeed / linked in, you'll be pretty much shocked how small is the RoR/Django/Node SV world compared to all the other poor fellas doing jar hell. But even if you look at the startup world, JVM shops are not completely gone, Google is doing lot's of Java, so do VMWare, Twitter, Foursquare etc. So as opposed to Applets , server side EJBs, ESBs, AbstractFactorySingletonBeanFilters have not gone away (yet) and will stay for longer than COBOL code probably (that runs your ATM) But to your question, I would add to the list: XML Data Islands [1] JavaFX [2] Silverlight (in 2020) [3] [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms766512(v=vs.85).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms76... [2] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/index... [3] http://gigaom.com/2010/10/29/microsoft-giving-up-on-silverlight-joining-html5-party/ http://gigaom.com/2010/10/29/microsoft-giving-up-on-silverli...
    • frou_dh 14y ago
      Was JavaFX DOA? I've never seen or even heard about it being used for anything.
    • memracom 14y ago
      JVM shops don't only do Java. They also do Clojure and Scala and Groovy. Grails is a Rails-like framework for Groovy on the JVM. And there is also a lot of Ruby running on the JVM in addition to Python and even PHP. In fact, if you need to integrate legacy Java applications with newer non-Java stuff, it is easiest to do it with Scala or Clojure so that you can continue using the same libraries. And if you want to get completely away from old-school Java and use the newest and most innovative languages, chances are that you will be using Scala with Akka on the JVM, or Clojure on the JVM. There is still good stuff that is outside the JVM or .NET worlds, such as Python, but the idea of an ecosystem built around a bytecode vm is very powerful and has a long life ahead of it, particularly the JVM and .NET.
      • EnderMB 14y ago
        But the above point still stands. In silicon valley, sure, some people are writing on top of the JVM using Scala, Clojure, Jython and every other cool JVM based language around, but in the real world you'll find a lot of people are still using straight-up Java, and they're happy with it! Java will always dominate, mainly because every single year the workforce is flooded with graduates that have been taught CS using Java, mostly because they want to keep their employment stats up and Java is where the jobs are. Some universities in the UK also use C# on occasion because .NET is quite strong in agencies. Your point is absolutely correct, but I cannot see companies in the real world switching from Java to another language on the JVM without a genuine business benefit for doing so. I also think it will be a while until people stop writing new projects in Java, because so many people graduate knowing mostly (sometimes only) Java.
      • vorg 14y ago
        > Clojure and Scala and Groovy. Grails These 3 languages are all heavily promoted, especially Grails right now because they have their big conference in a month.
• epc 14y ago
  S-HTTP was pitched as an alternative to SSL but died very quickly as neither MSIE nor Netscape Navigator supported it. My memory is fuzzy about it now but I recall one of the "advantages" being that you could selectively encrypt portions of a page. I also recall it being very convoluted to set up and maintain vs. encrypt everything over port 443.
• troymc 14y ago
  VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) has a page listing all HTML elements. The non-standard, obsolete, or deprecated ones are dimmed: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element
• zerohp 14y ago
  The peer to peer internet didn't survive. NAT ruined it, and now nobody has an expectation of connecting directly to another machine thats not set up for the sole purpose of hosting services. Based on what people say in the IPv6 threads, I don't think people realize what we've lost.