111–120 of 362 posts
Jokes aside, the only thing I remember about java on desktop is constantly downloading and installing frmeworks. And lags, lots of lags. Terrible lags. And flickering windows.
What happened in the years leading up to 2005, or perhaps in 2005 specifically that caused this blackout? Where did all of the Java desktop developers go? Before 2004, there was a much wider perception that web applications were fundamentally limited by their latency, and if you wanted a really rich, interactive user experience, like Winamp or Outlook, you had to make a desktop application. Then Gmail launched in 200…
That sounds about right to me. AJAX - or more broadly, what we call HTML5 could have been the gamechanger.
I've been coding Java since 1.2, mainly UI. 20 years we built a really complex control system visualizing thousands of graphical states on six monitors on a Pentium, quietly ticking away at 20% CPU usage... all in Swing. Which I still find very impressive. Swing suffered from two central weaknesses: the tutorials provided by Oracle were... often insufficient. And you could pick up some bad habits by following them. A…
Agreed. Also, the IDEs would typically give you too much rope - enough for a novice to hang himself. When you create a new project with Xcode, you get a default project with all of the essentials for a native app. The menus, a window, an "About" window. Etc. In most java IDEs you get an empty main() method. Making an app that feels like a first-class citizen requires a lot of work and attention to detail.
IMO the real decline was Oracle. Java used to be a slowly rising language and set of platforms with benevolent oversight from SUN and at least the outlook that it was one of a few things you might want to add after Microsoft's Windows or Apple's OS (Macintosh or later OSX). Then Oracle bought SUN and everyone knew all of the good would eventually be strangled out by the lawyers and models that sought to dominate and…
Basically, every growth figure of the language shows otherwise. Oracle is ain’t saints, but the amount of needless bashing it gets here is astonishing. Regardless of what its other branches are doing, Oracle managed to do one of the smoothest language takeovers where the (stellar) core team is virtually unchanged, the language became completely open sourced and it underwent tremendous changes which resulted in huge g…
The fact that the acquisition cast off a bunch of brilliant, distinguished, charismatic engineers who have every reason to further the mythmaking also plays into why we hear so much of it. But to give credit where it's due, it's given us this esteemable gem of a rant:
The development of the described scenario strongly devalued java's most advertised advantage, which was portability.
Java's only claim to fame is that's the granddaddy of C#, a far superior language and IMHO one of the greatest computer languages ever created. In addition, Java was ahead of its time, with mid-1990's computing power not up to the job of letting it run smoothly on lower and mid-tier PC's. It also required, for that time, an egregious amount of RAM memory.
Also, I really apologize for nitpicking, but "RAM memory" is a tautology.
High school AP Computer Science classes are still teaching Java today. I suppose many of the skills it develops are applicable to other languages, but this still needs to change. However ... Minecraft, anyone?
On the other hand Minecraft is the best-selling PC video game of all time and it was originally written in Java and the Java client is the definitive experience of the game.
Why? Well, I have absolutely no clue...
IIRC, Java had difficulties during the late 90's and early 2000's for advanced desktop applications mostly because of performance. As time passed, although jvm implementation's performance improved, so did C++, multi-platform frameworks and other programming languages. Other phenomenons also occurred: Linux continued with a very small fraction and the desktop effectively turned into a duopoly of windows and mac and n…
The apps were typically pretty ugly and Windows had a near monopoly at the time. If either of those were not true, it might have fared better.