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)
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.