Live data from Hacker News

Greatest Java apps

blogs.oracle.com

111–120 of 194 posts

Re: Greatest Java apps

#112
post #3

I'd nominate Bitwig for this. The UI is written in Java and is one of the nicest DAW interfaces around. The stuff they've been doing in the modular grid lately is particularly impressive. The fact that it's in Java means it works great on Linux too. https://www.bitwig.com/en/home.html

Does it use JavaFx for its UI? If not do you know what library/framework they use?

I could be wrong, but at first glance, it looks like Eclipse's SWT.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#113
post #42

I'm planning to get a Masters degree in CS, and it bothers me that the program I chose uses Java as the primary language. They have an awesome theoretical curriculum, but it looks like I'll have to use Java to complete all the practical tasks. I'm a Node/React web developer, I want to build a SaaS startup, and I'm not really interested in writing Java apps, I doubt I'll ever want to use it for something. Do you guys…

I hate Java for lots of reason, but it does do a few things really well, one of which is that it is easy to learn. Most of the core libraries are very consistently designed, so you don't need to hunt around documentation to find something. Instead you type import java.util. and look at the autocomplete list for the collection you want. Most of the standard libraries implement the same interface, so using them is almost always the same.

I haven't used Java in years, but I'm very certain I could pick it up again immediately with nothing more than an IDE. Contrast that with python, which I use almost every day and I still need to visit stack overflow to perform rudimentary tasks because libraries for it are a mess.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#114
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in Java every day, and I agree it's been a huge success. But I also don't think it's a good general purpose language. It's absolutely full of warts and gotchas and ergonomic problems and questionable design decisions that even the people who made them have come to regret. But known history tells us that there is very little correlation between a language's success and how well-designed it is. Outside of softwa…

> questionable design decisions that even the people who made them have come to regret. Such as?

Serialization is one of them http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/amber/serialization.h...

Re: Greatest Java apps

#115
post #2

The list generates some mixed feelings - #16 for example, where the inventor/maintainer got driven away by Oracle's acquisition of Sun and forked Jenkins from Hudson.

It's obviously and understandably a bit biased. There are a few omissions: No mention of anything mobile even though there are a few billion phones out there running Android with a huge app ecosystem of Java and Kotlin based stuff. Of course, that's a non Oracle flavor of Java as Sun sort of lost the plot on the J2ME front (another omission). J2ME was of course more successful than applets ever were until Android hap…

> Spring/Spring-boot is another painful one for Oracle because it largely sidelined J2EE related products and standardization.

I'm thankful for J2EE and things like EJB 2. It's complexity gave rise to Spring and it's amazing ecosystem of frameworks and tooling that we have today.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#116
post #2

The list generates some mixed feelings - #16 for example, where the inventor/maintainer got driven away by Oracle's acquisition of Sun and forked Jenkins from Hudson.

I gave up on Java when Oracle prematurely rolled JavaFX into the JDK and got rid of the dedicated bug tracker. I was using JavaFX a lot and frequently ran into bugs. I didn't mind the bugs because I thought the tech had a ton of potential, the JavaFX developers were really good, and it was easy to get things fixed. However, as soon as they rolled JavaFX into the JDK I knew it would be a nightmare for me. Without auth…

Do you now realize that it's been split out of the JDK again? https://github.com/openjdk/jfx

Re: Greatest Java apps

#117

What are the odds that a language known for its use in boring enterprise software is the language used to create the most popular video game in history (Minecraft). If C++ was a person it would be mad/salty at this fact.

I'm pretty sure the most popular video game in history was implemented in TTL. (Though Java versions certainly exist, too.) It's also worth noting that Minecraft was originally implemented in Java, but, in order to get it running on consoles and mobile, they had to port it to C++. Which doesn't discount how much Java contributed to its early success. (Most importantly, I'm guessing, by making it even feasible in the…

What graphical library did he use to implement Minecraft? Or did he roll his own?

Re: Greatest Java apps

#118
post #102
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used Java on and off since 1998, am yet to ever touch Guava. Android Java is Google's J++, with its half baked Java 8 compatibility, and deserves the same treatment that J++ once had.

Android Java != Java so no credit needed to be given. Though Google does make Java contributions in other libraries and projects which is very welcome by the community!

Their wrongdoings with Android to the Java eco-system are more harmful than whatever contributions they might have done.

Re: Greatest Java apps

#119
post #32
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that the relative ease of decompiling Java might have contributed significantly, since it made mods much easier than they would've been with C/C++.

Yeah, the game is almost source-available, thus almost infinitely moddable. Games that provide neat modding APIs (thinking Factorio, Rimworld) are, while commendable, inherently limited. If Minecraft were C++ you'd have to be able to recompile it yourself for equivalent moddability.

Could Minecraft have succeeded if it had a sub-level scripting language, like Lisp? The way that AutoCad uses it for its sub programming. Or the way Emacs uses Lisp for macro programming.

Or did it need the full Java source code to re-mod the program?

Re: Greatest Java apps

#120
post #82
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my faux pax. The point was that the move is away from Java, whether Dart or Kotlin.

Waiting for them to rewrite Android Studio in Kotlin and the complete Android infrastructure that depends on OpenJDK for the emulator and AOSP builds.

https://www.jetbrains.org/intellij/sdk/docs/intro/intellij_p...

> The IntelliJ Platform is a JVM application, written mostly in Java and Kotlin

Pretty sure Kotlin was birthed to address issues they ran into while developing IntelliJ

Android Studio is built on Intellij.

Post reply on HN