Re:The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
by naruhodo on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @08:47PM
(#30536085)
The article glosses over a couple of points I recall from living through the same period:
- JBuilder was performant (and as I recall, for GUI development, awesome). Not sure if it was Swing-based, but it was a counterpoint to the idea that you couldn't build performant Java GUI apps.
- Applets were stifled by Microsoft refusing to include a contemporary Java runtime in IE, which was still dominant around 2000. My recollection is a bit vague now, but I seem to recall that Java applets in IE were stuck on a 1.0 JVM when Java 1.2 was contemporary.
It's worth noting that I was developing on Linux and Windows. The author's experience would have been coloured by his use of the Mac platform. Up until quite recently, Macs were stuck on Java 6 while the rest of us were using Java 8, at least. I can't help but wonder if Apple considered Java to be a second class citizen.
Re:The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
by tadfisher on Friday March 04, 2022 @12:39AM
(#30551081)
I believe Microsoft went all out on "extinguishing" applets after Sun sued the Microsoft Java project out of existence. Hence the contemporaneous beginnings of C# and the CLR.
- JBuilder was performant (and as I recall, for GUI development, awesome). Not sure if it was Swing-based, but it was a counterpoint to the idea that you couldn't build performant Java GUI apps.
- Applets were stifled by Microsoft refusing to include a contemporary Java runtime in IE, which was still dominant around 2000. My recollection is a bit vague now, but I seem to recall that Java applets in IE were stuck on a 1.0 JVM when Java 1.2 was contemporary.
It's worth noting that I was developing on Linux and Windows. The author's experience would have been coloured by his use of the Mac platform. Up until quite recently, Macs were stuck on Java 6 while the rest of us were using Java 8, at least. I can't help but wonder if Apple considered Java to be a second class citizen.