Saving Journalism With Flash and Java

An anonymous reader writes "New York magazine has a story about some of the flashy new ideas that are coming out of the labs of the New York Times. The piece prompted Peter Wayner to dig up some of the old Java applets he wrote to explore whether more promiscuity really stops AIDS and whether baseball can do anything to speed up the games. He notes that these took a great deal of work to produce and it's not possible to do them on a daily basis. Furthermore, they're cranky and fragile, perhaps thanks to Java. Are cool, interactive features the future of journalism on the web? Or will simple ASCII text continue to be the most efficient way for us to mingle our thoughts, especially when ASCII text won't generate a classloading error?"

Comments

Re:Cranky and fragile, due to Java?

[H0p313ss]

Dear Java Hating Slashdot Editors,

Java is not responsible for "generating class loader errors", any more than Perl is responsible for all the HTML errors on the Slashdot front page.

Here's the link to the W3C HTML Validator, go get yourself a clue.

You are correct. However Java applets are an incredibly brittle technology for provisioning software services.

I would go so far as to argue that Suns initial attempts to introduce Java as a technology for creating dynamic web content has been the single greatest thing working against the adoption of Java in the industry.

Java is a very powerful language and it definitely has its place in my tool-belt, but it certainly ain't for client-side applets.