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Several operating systems, plus a few additional API which seek to be cross platform. At a minimum, Adobe Flash, Oracle/Sun JavaFX, and presumably Microsoft Silverlight have aspirations of that sort, adding 3 additional API to the mix.

Looks like Java Swing is still popular. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/422956/java-swing-or-java-qt Now we have JavaFX for many more special graphical effects: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/index-jsp-139879.html http://javafx.com/

You really should be looking at JavaFX instead of Swing if you're interested in creating rich GUI environments in Java. You can get a good sense of the future of each of these technologies on Amy Fowler's blog. Amy was one of the founding members of the Swing toolkit - she knows what she's talking about. It's not always what Swing developers want to hear, but you know, life goes on.

Yes and it is called JavaFX. It was released a decade to late though and still statically typed like Java. Which is one of the other reasons why Java never became big on the web.

> Java really only has tools for programmers, not psuedo-programmer artist types who typically create cool things in Flash. Sun seems to have never gotten this aspect.


They actually have, and it's called Java FX.

However, there's just nothing else out there right now with the same mix of capabilities...

Oh, really?

yes, really. i'm sure that "in theory" javafx is just as good as adobe flex/air. in practice, i've yet to see javafx do anything except crap all over itself

However, there's just nothing else out there right now with the same mix of capabilities...

Oh, really?

Yeah, I'm watching that rabbit movie thing right now. It's not terribly quick, but it does appear to work. It seems not to require anything other than Java installed, no plug-ins or anything. I can live with that...

They've done it! They have *finally* done it. Beyond all hype, potential vaporware and marketing bullcrap they have - for once - actually pulled through with RIAs. People this is the first time in history that Sun has actually pulled through with implementing a piece of Java in a form that Java was initially meant for: A cross plattform rich & powerfull client enviroment. Finally Java and its VM have stepped up and entered the ring with Flash!

Only intially releasing for OS X and Windows is a large downside, as it will get negative votes from opinion leaders in the field, but the simple fact that they pulled through and didn't stop at 20% with some half-assed crappy Java Media Framework or some other piece of sh*t they've released ever since Flash took the helm at rich clients 10 years ago is a very big supprising plus!!! And the release-website (why the f*ck isn't this, the most important prime sorce even linked in the GP metaarticle???) doesn't even look like total crap.

If they actually manage to pull through with a broad parallel release policy for this in the near future, manage to reduce JFX deployment to zero-fuss Flash-style and release the java-based FOSS tools and IDEs for JFX as announced a year ago, we will - for the first time in the history of the web - see a true competitor to Flash rise. This is good news in so many ways I can't even describe. If Sun plays its cards right and continues applying common sense and not screwing around this time and Adobe isn't on its toes, we will have a fully free open source rich client platform in just a few years and Flash will be history. Yay! Go, Sun, go!

I can't tell you how much I and many other professional Flash developers have waited for this moment for the last 8 years.

Even though it is still a shame,
you CAN view JavaFX used on webpages. It seams to work just like java-applets, only nicer to look at. (Sadly it also has the same slow loading as applets)

Example: http://javafx.com/samples/StopWatch/index.html

Ultimately applets never really caught on for a several of reasons, including

1. machines back in the 90s weren't powerful enough to run an interpreted execution layer with ease. Try running any modern environment like Java, .Net or parrot within a web browser with less than a 1ghz machine with 1/2 a gig of RAM - it won't be pretty.
2. Microsoft sabotaged Java. Sun successfully sued them for releasing an incompatible version.
3. Sun's implementation required a ~ 10MB download and then took several seconds to load each time.

As far as accessing the browser DOM, Java applets can via LiveConnect.

As for speed and size, Sun have been addressing this in their consumer JRE. Further, the LiveConnect Javascript bridge has been rewritten for FireFox 3.

BTW, I've never seen anything run in an applet beside Java.

How would you know? It's all compiled down and distributed as the same bytecode - the source language code be java, python, groovy or ruby. Just as would be supplied to parrot - the difference being that javascript is generally distributed in source form rather than bytecode. And by the way, the UI toolkit (AWT/Swing) != Java the platform. It supplements HTML with a cross-platform toolkit, something parrot won't support[1]. But no one's forcing developers to use it; as I've mentioned, Java can directly manipulate the DOM.

[1] Ok, there's XUL but that will only work in firefox and related browsers.

... I won't trust anybody with Rich Client technologies further than I can throw them. Be it Adobe, Curl, Wild Tangent, or - heavens forbid - Microsoft. Take that from an experienced Flash Application Developer. For years and years now Adobe has been keeping Linux on a short leash. Allways coming up late, now, once again, limiting proposed hardware acceleration and certain functions to certain host OSes, ect.

I like Flash and it's a remarkable asset. But I've never fully trusted these guys and my trust in them isn't growing.

Yet it looks as though after 10 years Sun is finally getting serious at attempting move towards RIA territory. If JavaFX is halfway decent, it could actually become the new king of all things RIA we've all been waiting for. If the core components of it are open source and the reference implementations aswell, then we're all set for a bright new future of RIAs.

I just started at a new job at the beginning of this year after quitting from my last job where I barely got to do any programming. The place where I work now is a Java shop. I was getting back to Java programming after a hiatus of a few years. For the last few years I mostly doing Perl with a smattering of C (PHP and Javascript on occasion). My experience with Java was mainly from college and a few odd projects I did here and there. The language had changed quite a bit over the last few years and to be honest, I surprised myself by being happy to get back to it (I had some sort of vague dislike for it for a period of time).

The company sponsored a trip to JavaOne at San Francisco earlier this month, for the Dev Team. I also got to go. This was my first time at JavaOne. It was amazing, exciting, and I learnt a LOT of new stuff. The main thing I got from there was that Java, far from being a programming language, is also a platform. There are a lot of new things being built on TOP of Java. For example, Groovy, and JavaFX. Java now has excellent support and frameworks to roll your OWN domain-specific languages.

Python and Ruby are not going to push Java out of the way. For example, you have mergers of Java with these languages (Jython and JRuby). Essentially you have Python and Ruby using Java resources and libraries. I think instead of "dying", Java is just going to evolve into a stable platform that lets you build stuff on top of it.

JavaFX.com uses JavaScript and QuickTime to promote the benefits of JavaFX. No JVM needed.

(Of course, you still have to visit the Wikipedia article for an introduction in context.)