Oracle's Ambitious Plan For Client-Side Java

Posted by timothy on Saturday October 8, 2011 @04:19AM from the larry-pulls-a-shot dept.

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.'"

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Re:licenses by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-08 04:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

We thought (signed) Java applets would be a sound method to get cross-platform client software onto desktops. What we found is that the browser plugin from Sun/Oracle and even OpenJDK is buggy and unstable on most platforms. We get assertion failures out of the plugin loader that have been listed as bugs on Sun's tracker for almost a decade, as well as bizarre GUI related exceptions. Things seem to get worse the more you use the applet/browser interfaces, for example to access the cookie store or the page DOM.
It crashes or hangs Firefox and Seamonkey on Linux x64 perhaps 10% of the time the applet loads. It crashes Safari on Mac OS X over 50% of the time. It seems most stable, but still not foolproof, on older Windows systems.