Oracle's Ambitious Plan For Client-Side Java

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that the real news out of this year's JavaOne is Oracle's ambitious plan to revitalize Java on the desktop, the Web, and mobile devices. 'It's been tempting to assume that Oracle, with its strong enterprise focus, would ignore the client in favor of data center technologies such as Java EE. This week, we learned that's not the case. In fact, the real news from this year's JavaOne conference in San Francisco may not be Oracle's plans for Java 8 and 9, but the revelation that Oracle is gearing up for a new, sustained push behind Java for the desktop, the Web, and mobile devices. If it can succeed in its ambitious plans, the age of client-side Java could be just beginning.'"

Comments

Re:*yawn*

[Xugumad]

> resource and memory hog

Got anything to show it's worse than .Net?

> there's tons of Java exploits out there but none for .NET

What, language-level exploits in Java? Care to give an example?

> Java development is light years behind .NET and C#.

Erm. Hey, quick, distraction! Behind you! *runs*

Seriously though, yes Java lags behind in features. Cross-platform development; Java runs on Windows, Linux, the BSDs, Blackberry phones, Android (well, it's a close varient) and frankly pretty much everything else too. I'll admit game development in Java is decidedly mixed (I believe, anyway, have never tried it myself).

Ultimately, there's a lot of code out there in Java, and it's not at all a bad platform, the world does not move on just because something a bit better comes out.

no need. javascript has too much momemtum

[GodWasAnAlien]

Google was the best bet in bringing Java back to life.

But Oracle is suing Google for making Java somewhat popular again ...

I imagine even Google will give up on Java at some point with some new platform that exposes binder services to javascript, deprecates Java, and merges with Chrome OS.

Re:*yawn*

[Xugumad]

Brilliant, now try making it run on OpenBSD. Too weird? How about OS X?

Well done, you used a tool appropriate to the job, and got a good result. I've written C# apps to integrate with MS Office, platform-agnostic server apps in Java, high performance stuff in C, text processing tools in Perl and text adventures in Inform. In all cases, the language fitted what I wanted to do, well, but that doesn't make it inherently better than another language in some grand scheme of things.

Re:No Thanks

[Cwix]

If these IT monkeys really wanted to remove the most targeted attack vector from their "users" machines they would replace "Windows" with something secure.

Actually if they wanted to remove the most targeted attack vector they would remove the users from the machines.

HTML5 etc.

[lkcl]

um, i know it's being said quite a lot, already, but it's worth repeating: java's pretty much dead on the desktop. people are even replacing Flash applications with HTML5, as it's reaching high market share and maturity, especially now that IE9 has actually better (read "stricter") HTML5 compliance than the Free Software equivalents. how in god's name is oracle expecting to break into that?

the other thing that's worth emphasising is that when you have alternative language bindings to HTML5, you get the best of both worlds. so... why doesn't oracle put its money behind getting java bindings (or, better "generic" bindings like DCOM and XPCOM) on top of HTML5 browser engines? with Trident (the engine behind MSHTML aka IE) that's a done deal already: Trident (MSHTML.DLL and MSXML.DLL) already *has* DCOM bindings so it's a matter of about 2-3 weeks to get something like that up-and-running. XPCOM (XulRunner) is a little trickier: you'd have to find or create java bindings to XPCOM (they don't exist afaik) and the hardest (technically speaking) is webkit (used in android, safari, ipphon etc.)

then you have literally the best of both worlds. HTML5 as the "front-end", and whatever-language-you-choose to control and direct it. btw this is exactly what's been done for the pyjamas project (http://pyjs.org) except using python not java.

Re:Never ever going to happen

[angel'o'sphere]

Dalvik which used a different byte-code format that is almost a one-to-one byte code replacement to the JVM format.

That is incorrect. Javas byte code manipulates a stack, the Dalvik VM is a register machine.