121–130 of 362 posts
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.
not really a desktop app though, is it? And Minecraft is also a notable outlier. Outside of mobile, there are very few games written in java on PC or consoles.
On the desktop, Microsoft and C++ were already well established. In the browser, Sun did not offer a browser of their own, so Java depended on support from Netscape, Microsoft and eventually Google. Those companies all had their own technologies for browser development tools, and never tried very hard to support Java. Also Java was a little too much for many 90's era PC's connecting to the internet over dial-up connections, so it was slow.
- Obviously non-native look and feel. For many years Java apps didn't even use the system font. At a time when everything was on Windows and its UI was actually reasonably coherent, Java apps stood out as out of place and clunky.
- Deployment. Each user needed to first install the Java runtime from Sun. This was a deliberate strategy by Sun to get the runtime in place on as many desktops as possible, but it failed colossally. It would have been better to just bundle the whole thing with each app, as Electron does today.
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…
I am not sure that was the problem, The way I recall it: 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.
The main problems with Java on the desktop were: - Obviously non-native look and feel. For many years Java apps didn't even use the system font. At a time when everything was on Windows and its UI was actually reasonably coherent, Java apps stood out as out of place and clunky. - Deployment. Each user needed to first install the Java runtime from Sun. This was a deliberate strategy by Sun to get the runtime in place…
Hmm... no. Even ms software on windows had different appearance and behavior. Actually, being a mostly proprietary ecosystem, apps tried to be different from one another to get attention. An xp machine running winamp, corel draw, ms office, windows messenger and internet explorer had 5 different themed apps at the same time and it was common at the time; it was the rule.
Consistency on windows was always a problem.
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…
One of the problems in my opinion is that once you went up the chain beyond the developers, it seemed like there were some people that didn't understand what they were doing or didn't care or possibly both. They had targets to meet (or something) and the health of the project was a secondary concern. Part of this could be seen by the messaging saying they were investing in JavaFX, mobile, etc., but most of the commits to the repo were done by a few people. I can't remember what the numbers were, but I remember being shocked and thinking that if one of the top two contributors disappeared the project would be in trouble.
However, the biggest mistake in my opinion was forcing JavaFX into the JDK way too quickly. You can tell that's the type of decision that comes from the top down. They wanted to be able to say the JDK had a next generation GUI toolkit and checking that box was more important than letting the project develop in a healthy manner.
Before JavaFX went into the JDK it was really easy to contribute to the project via the dedicated bug tracker and you could get quick, friendly, helpful feedback directly from the developers. Bugs were fixed and would land in the next release. After it was part of the JDK you had to use bugs.jdk.com and it became much harder to participate. Factor in JavaFX having to adhere to the JDK release schedule rather than iterating quickly like they had been and it was impossible to figure out what Oracle was trying to do. Was having JavaFX on the JDK marketing material really worth stalling the development and ruining any chance it had of becoming more popular? I still can't get my head around it.
The fixation on the browser plugin and applets always confused me too. It was obvious for years they'd eventually get locked out of browsers, so I don't know why they didn't push things like Web Start a lot harder. Web Start was a pretty decent distribution system and if they had improved it to fetch JREs, like OpenWebStart does now, it would have been one of the best options at the time.
To this day I'm convinced that JavaFX was a missed opportunity. I'd love to try to build an app that uses Gluon [1] stuff for direct framebuffer rendering on a Raspberry PI with Mender [2] for distribution. I think you could combine something like that with JxBrowser [3] to build a digital signage system that's much better than anything on the market, but the licensing is a huge pain and too expensive for a hobbyist project.
I used to love Java. Although I think they ruined it with the concept of "Enterprise Java" which only complicating how they were delivering the software. Many good things came out of this work that has been ported to many other frameworks (although, not with the enterprise branding) Java is not slow, I use a couple of high quality desktop applications and these will most likely have a future as long as the language i…
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…
Oracle certainly wasn't good for Java. But Java-on-the-desktop had been struggling for years before that. You either bundled a complete JVM with your application (fine if you're making a 500MB IDE, not so good for anything smaller) or you had the embarrassment of directing your users to an installer that bundled the Ask toolbar. They might even end up with the security-hole-riddled java browser plugin. And even once…
but at least this would let them play Ski Stunt Simulator...