Java's Greatest Missed Opportunity?

jg21 writes "It looks like Bruce Eckel has hit the nail on the head again. No sooner did he finish stirring debate by writing about the 'departure of the Java hyper-enthusiasts,' previously discussed here on Slashdot, than he now rubs salt in the wound by highlighting in AJAXWorld Magazine how and why Java missed its golden opportunity to become the language undergirding Rich Internet Applications. He comments: 'We must ask why Java applets haven't become ubiquitous on the internet as the client-side standard for RIAs....This is an especially poignant question because Gosling and team justified rushing Java out the door (thus casting in stone many poorly-considered decisions) so that it could enable the internet revolution. That's why the AWT and Applets were thrown in at the last second, reportedly taking a month from conception to completion.'"

Comments

Re:Missed the Boat on Missing the Boat

[Tablizer]

Most of these just seem to be you bragging about how great you are compared to everybody else. When I see publically-inspectable coded examples of how great Java and Java frameworks are, maybe I'll start to beleive you. Call it "open source evidence". What I see instead is that it takes 3 times as many Java programmers and 3 times as much code to create and maintain the same thing as would be in PHP, ColdFusion, Python, or Dot.Net. Java programmers don't care if they are inefficient as long as they get a big paycheck. Sun seems to not want you to ever see the database, and builds giant walls around it in the name of "encapsulation" to keep you away from them. Seems Sun wants to steal sells from Oracle. Productivity be damned.