Along with MacOS X, Apple's Xcode IDE even had native java project support briefly in this era as well.

We didn't touch a fairly esoteric language called Python much. Because we saw the future. Java and IPv6 was about to change everything.

One of the versions of the most popular game in the world is written in Java, and it's quite capable of being very fast.

Minecraft does do some horrible things to the JVM, but it's strong and can take it.

Because it is graphically simple. That's not even a CPU issue.

millions of blocks in memory at any time and has to cull which to not render, etc).

128x128x128 is already 2 million voxels. Minecraft and any other game like that can use an octree or some variation to not individually deal with blocks. When things are in the distance or occluded or empty space you cull a courser level of the octree.

Java can be fast compared to scripting languages but I don't know why minecraft would be an example. It is a simple game that was poorly written and had to be re-written in C++ for other platforms. It got by on being simple and but running on full PCs at the same time.

I just remember that GUI programming with Swing felt like molasses compared to native GUIs at that time (i.e. Win32/MFC, Cocoa, Motif).

But of course the cross-platform aspect was cool and since I did quite a bit with Solaris back then, Java got of course pushed a lot by Sun.

It was definitely the thing for a while. Although I remember my very first steps with Java and Swing and my primary impression was "this is so slow".