It was going to run on every device in my kitchen, and they were all going to talk to each other. Instead the first niche it found was J2EE, and that "write once, run anywhere" was a bit comical, because who swaps out the OS on their server?
It was apparently good enough to be the choice for Android and similar, but that was much later.
It's really difficult to describe how people -- especially non programmers -- bought into the hype surrounding Java.
I've since seen a bit of that hype around some things, but never to that extent: XML, SPA, a strange obsession with tiled widgets.
The first niche was applets. A managed language with a batteries-included library, familiar syntax and cross-platform GUI story was a new thing at the time.
ps: I forgot, the JVM spec was a good thing, it made a lot of things sound for people, so easier deployments and less inconsistencies.
It's interesting in today's era of Rust, that people think of Java as failing to replace C++; in practice, it was only 90% successful, and managed to replace the vast majority of cases where people did use it.
About the only things that didn't get replaced were (some) desktop gui apps, and apps that were so tiny that they weren't worth the launch of the JVM.
But you got me curious.. what kind of backend code was written in c++ ? did people write server side logic in it ? I remember seeing some Oracle C code but it felt like a strange thing and not a c/c++ land. But to be honest that's not my world.
The JVM on the other hand was not chosen by Google, Apple, Alibaba and basically the majority of web servers to be the base stone of their functionality by accident.
Things like Google Maps and Gmail came as something of a shock. They were near-desktop-level apps entirely within the browser. That meant JS, not because of the language but because it was the only cross-platform system that gave access. It should have been possible to do that for Java as well, but they never really tried.
People like you that complain about C,PHP,Java etc forget the history , your favorite cool language did not exist at that time or if it existed had probably a lot of downsides. Also many complainers do not work with the languages and repeat like parrots something they read. I would love to get some perfect programming language, something with more maths in it that forces thinking of solutions and less glueing shit together or rewriting X and CoolLang for my CV.
Was java an embedded project at first ? yes
Was it then a client side universal solution ? yes
is it still any of those two ? no
Also please don't make comments on me assuming I'm parroting, that would be nice :)
This remains true?
I also worked on a Java screen sharing in browser web conference solution back when this was not possible with native stuff or with Flash, if you understood the language you could get good performance.
Is better then any other similarly featured IDE, so good that people pay for it rather then use free alternatives
I did not said you specifically but I doubt you have years of experience in PHP and Java but let me know How what was the better alternative back then? Writing webpackes in C or some proprietary language with a paid compiler? Was there something much better and for some reason people used PHp because was cool and were tons of "write in PHP zelots"?
From my memory the LAMP stack was free and was easy to start with, Java was much more productive then the alternatives and it had good tools, books and documentation. I can't think at any good alternative except the late C# but Microsoft was to incompetent to do the right thing and kept it proprietary and Windows only for a long time.
So what else was more productive? you said PHP is not the answer and "websphere" is not Java the language or Java the ecosystem (think of the many Java libraries out there and at the good enough Java standard library compared to others)
It's like playing snooker, claiming a ball, missing it but scoring all the other ones accidentally and bragging.