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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.'"
Is the reason that Javascript-based stuff taking over the role Java was supposed to fill ten years ago that Microsoft no longer ships a Java engine but it does ship a Javascript interpreter?
Microsoft stopped shipping Java long after Java had already died on the desktop. No, the simple reason is that Sun Java is a p.o.s. technologically, and has been proprietary and highly controlled by Sun for the last decade.
Sun did it to themselves with Java. Their recent "open source" announcement is merely an act of desperation, and even now, they still can't bring themselves to let go.
Flash has versions that run on Windows, x86 Linux and OSX. If you're running anything else as your desktop system you can go fuck yourself.
Whoopdy fucking do.
10 years of convincing people that applets are "fast" has resulted in them realizing they really aren't so fast. So now instead of users having 10 seconds of a non-responsive grey page rendered by their browser, they get a 7 year old shitty animated icon laughing at them for making the shitty mistake of visiting the page.
So who limited the JDK to 1.1.18
no-one forced them to make a JVM in the first place, similarly no-=one forced then to upgrade it to 1.2. Its a stupid argument that MS should produce the best implementation of some other company's product. Why could Sun not have made something that ran on Windows, why is it always MS's fault that Java wasn't good enough?