Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv...
by ballenf on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @12:10PM
(#15393449)
> you're going to have to check every single feature of HTML5 you use ... you will spend more far time working around browser specific issues than you will spend dealing with OS specific issues in Java.
I'm confused at this comparison in terms of Electron. Do you have to worry about any of that when doing an Electron app? Or were you making a comparison between JavaFX and web dev?
Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv...
by mike_hearn on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @05:12PM
(#15404732)
You're right that with Electron that's not an issue as you control the browser. I was comparing the equivalent issue in web dev to the "write once run anywhere" issue in Java. If you pick the users operating system e.g. only support Windows then of course, there are no cross platform issues with Java either
Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv...
by kakwa_ on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @03:09PM
(#15395133)
> I bundled the JRE with my app so the users did not need to have Java installed.
Side note here: do you track security vulnerabilities of the shipped JRE and provide updates when it happens?
Too often, I've seen java applications shipping obsolete and vulnerable JRE. And in some cases, I've seen not consistent versions across a product line.
Also wasn't there some unknowns about the right to redistribute the Oracle JRE?
Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv...
by mike_hearn on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @05:13PM
(#15404740)
I do track those. I didn't need to update my app at any point for them because most vulnerabilities in the JRE are to do with sandbox escapes and my app did not run potentially malicious code.
Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv...
by mjparme on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @11:29AM
(#15401162)
> Also wasn't there some unknowns about the right to redistribute the Oracle JRE?
Nope, Oracle clearly says you can in their FAQ:
Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv...
by wieghant on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @02:01PM
(#15394530)
> It's better than it once was, but you're going to have to check every single feature of HTML5 you use to figure out which browsers implement it
There's tools for that and i'm pretty sure just writing plain html and css or some compile-to-js would have shaved off significant time from that 8 month full dev time.
Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv...
by mike_hearn on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @05:15PM
(#15404764)
It wouldn't have been possible to do as a webapp at all, as the app in question was a peer to peer app that spoke a fairly complex network protocol that doesn't support WebSockets (Bitcoin). But even if that issue hadn't existed, the development time went mostly on logic and p2p/networking issues. HTML wouldn't have helped and JavaFX supports a dialect of CSS2 anyway.
The leaks in the operating system abstraction Java gives you are really quite small. I wrote my entire app on macOS and tested on Linux/Windows only right at the end - after about 8 months of full time dev work I spent about a day addressing platform specific issues. That's pretty good.
Now compare that to the mess that web browsers were and still are. It's better than it once was, but you're going to have to check every single feature of HTML5 you use to figure out which browsers implement it, which don't, which use vendor prefixes still, which only half implement it, which don't but can be shimmed using big blobs of JavaScript and so on. The web absolutely doesn't "just work": you will spend more far time working around browser specific issues than you will spend dealing with OS specific issues in Java.