The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
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The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
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Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
#2>> This history is neither meant to be comprehensive, nor necessarily chronological. I’m recounting my own journey through the Java desktop landscape, and it will be biased towards Mac
This paragraph should really be right in the beginning of the post, instead of in the conclusion.
Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
#3I just wish it'd go away entirely. I'm not a dev. But an admin.
And I despise supporting or troubleshooting Java applications.
Unfortunately that's my life these days.
From an admin perspective, python, php, hell.. Even ruby. All fine. But Java is a nightmare.
Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
#4Java Swing still lets you make native-looking-and-feeling apps (with some care). I don't know of any new GUI frameworks that let you do the same. I consider this a killer-feature of the framework. It's also very fast, backed by OpenGL and DirectX. It also ships with source code and isn't declarative, so it's trivial to step into as a means to debug why your code isn't working.
Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
#5I just wish it'd go away entirely. I'm not a dev. But an admin. And I despise supporting or troubleshooting Java applications. Unfortunately that's my life these days. From an admin perspective, python, php, hell.. Even ruby. All fine. But Java is a nightmare.
Can you explain why it's so hard? I've had a lot better luck running Java apps than Python.
Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
#6> As new versions of Java were released, and Internet Explorer entered the scene, the HTML code required to embed your applet became increasingly complex, with different tags used for different browsers and versions or Java. The tag was advertised as the correct way to embed an applet in a “multi-browser” environment, but Internet Explorer used the tag and Mozilla used the tag.
In the time I was playing around with applets (largely after the dates mentioned in this article, mind you), I don't think I came across any site using applets that didn't stick with . Using / might have been more "correct," but this is also fervently an era where trying to enforce "correct" HTML usage was at best an attempt to whip the tide into submission.
Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
#7Java Swing still lets you make native-looking-and-feeling apps (with some care). I don't know of any new GUI frameworks that let you do the same. I consider this a killer-feature of the framework. It's also very fast, backed by OpenGL and DirectX. It also ships with source code and isn't declarative, so it's trivial to step into as a means to debug why your code isn't working.
I will freely admit that Java Swing remains the only GUI toolkit I've used that I actually felt comfortable using to write a GUI, rather than something that feels like having to pull out teeth to get things working in a somewhat coherent manner.
Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
#8Java Swing still lets you make native-looking-and-feeling apps (with some care). I don't know of any new GUI frameworks that let you do the same. I consider this a killer-feature of the framework. It's also very fast, backed by OpenGL and DirectX. It also ships with source code and isn't declarative, so it's trivial to step into as a means to debug why your code isn't working.
Racket's GUI library comes pretty close, although the memory consumption needs work:
Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
#9I just wish it'd go away entirely. I'm not a dev. But an admin. And I despise supporting or troubleshooting Java applications. Unfortunately that's my life these days. From an admin perspective, python, php, hell.. Even ruby. All fine. But Java is a nightmare.
Can you explain why it's so hard? I've had a lot better luck running Java apps than Python.
I am not admin, but kind of manage non-prod servers. One problem with Java is that a lot of things are half-done. If it totally relied on OS it would have worked, or if Java solution was thorough it would have worked. SSL management and Java app monitoring with tools like jconsole comes to mind. But others might have different annoyances.
It is working on one server and then broke on a newly built server apparently due to some network settings which devs/ app admins are not aware of.
Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
#10As a C# developer I remember the first time I developed a GUI java application. In C# you have a code-behind file with your own code and event handlers, and a "designer file" with the generated code to set-up the GUI itself.
Then I used Netbeans for a Java app, and the code file contained weird sections of artificially not editable code, and event handlers were so much more complex and cumbersome - with inner classes etc. Felt really like a step back.