Good riddance: I guess Java is on a purge right now. First public static void main, now this unused mess. Its good for the ecosystem.
Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
11–20 of 101 posts
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#12> In the 2000's, politics interfered and browser vendors removed plug-in support, instead preferring their own walled gardens and restricted sandboxes That's one way to say it. The more common way was that users got tired of crappy plugins crashing their browsers, and browser devs got tired of endless complaints from their users. It wasn't "politics" of any sort that made browsers sandbox everything. It was the insan…
Yeah, a totally mind boggling statement, almost completely void of reality. I wasn't even tired of the crashes, it was just a totally awful experience of using them in every way. They took forever to load, were clunky to use and even just downright ugly because the UI had nothing to do with what you usually got to use, and was a lot worse. The idea was good on paper, but the implementation sucked. Everyone, well almo…
Even Flash wasn't as bad as Java applets, and that's saying something.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#13I started with Applets in 1996, moving from Borland/Turbo C to Java. The Applet UI was never as smooth and rich as the OS-native stuff such as Windows GUI apps. But it was a great developement that brought applications to the web. IE+DHTML with a massive DOM API and VBScript+ASP took over soon, from 1997, to produce HTML-native interactive experience. People wrote ActiveX code to handle button clicks.
Servlets on the server-side survived a bit longer than applets, by evolving into JSP.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#14> In the 2000's, politics interfered and browser vendors removed plug-in support, instead preferring their own walled gardens and restricted sandboxes That's one way to say it. The more common way was that users got tired of crappy plugins crashing their browsers, and browser devs got tired of endless complaints from their users. It wasn't "politics" of any sort that made browsers sandbox everything. It was the insan…
The "walled gardens" he referred to are in fact based on open standards and open source, while the Applet runtime is not.
Not all of Java is open source. The TCK, the testing suite for standard compliance, for instance, is proprietary, and only organizations with Oracle's blessing can gain access. AdoptOpenJDK was only granted access after they stopped distributing another Java runtime, OpenJ9.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#15The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time. I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM. I hear that no…
I understand the sarcasm but this take is devoid of fact. Modern Java loads fast, Java 21 has pretty good functional programming featurez. The ecosystem churns out language level features at a pace and a budget that would put most large funded startups to shame. Java is also the workhorse of the big data ecosystem and moves enough money either as product revenue or as transactions than most nations GDP. They didn't f…
There's zero sarcasm in my comment.
The JVM is quite different from Java language features or Scala language features. I've written entire programs in JVM bytecode, without a compiler, and I see very little of value in it. A stack based machine? Why? Not a huge blocker, it's weird, but usable. The poor engineering around the JVM for many use cases? That's a blocker for me, and where are the alternatives in implementation that don't have the atrocious launch performance and interface for specifying class path and jars?
Java may be used a lot, but so is Windows. It's an accident of history, of early adoption and network effects, rather than being inherently good technology. Java, the language, made a very wide and broad swath of programmers productive, just as Windows lets a very wide and broad set of IT people run IT systems, without having to learn as much or know as much as they would need to with, say, Linux. But Java's low-barrier-to-entry is quite distinct from the weaknesses of the JVM...
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#16Compose multiplatform is the spiritual successor to JVM in the browser. Compiles to wasm, modern api, great developer experience. It's kotlin so not java, but easy for java developers to learn.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#17> In the 2000's, politics interfered and browser vendors removed plug-in support, instead preferring their own walled gardens and restricted sandboxes That's one way to say it. The more common way was that users got tired of crappy plugins crashing their browsers, and browser devs got tired of endless complaints from their users. It wasn't "politics" of any sort that made browsers sandbox everything. It was the insan…
The "walled gardens" he referred to are in fact based on open standards and open source, while the Applet runtime is not. Not all of Java is open source. The TCK, the testing suite for standard compliance, for instance, is proprietary, and only organizations with Oracle's blessing can gain access. AdoptOpenJDK was only granted access after they stopped distributing another Java runtime, OpenJ9.
ActiveX was hell for security.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#18The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time. I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM. I hear that no…
Java wasn't that bad for crappy 2D adventure games, but for the rest it was atrocious. Even TCL/Tk looked faster with AMSN than trying to use Java based software which was like trying to run Gnome 4 under 1GB of RAM.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#19This is an interesting project and it's always neat to see things that are able to compile down to WASM for running in the browser. However, looking through the docs for Flavour and this feels like it would get very painful very quickly trying to write anything of substance.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#20The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time. I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM. I hear that no…
I guess in the era of SSDs (vs. spinning disks) and multi-GHz cores, the startup really isn't a big issue anymore? I wonder how long Teams or Slack would take to launch when it's on a 5400rpm disk on a 2000 era computer...
I remember my 2000 computer could play an mp3. But thats it. Your system is 100% utilized. No way it could even think about a modern gas guzzling app.