Re:Crunched
by mynameishere on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @02:17PM
(#77113)
Don't get into language wars when you're trying to sell a product. Obviously, Java applets work for yahoo and for the people who use yahoo games, so people are evidentally able to tolerate "bloated nightmares".
Applets have clunky startup/shutdown processes. That's their main problem. Aside from that, they duplicate the desktop experience quite accurately, unlike Ajax, which is a permanent kludge.
Plus, how else are we going to play Kid Icarus without applets:
http://www.davieboy.net/play/game.all.play.asp?rom=11.zip...
I could be wrong, but I don't think you've done many Yahoo fantasy drafts if you think people are really OK with the draft interface. The reason I've continued to use the site over the years is more that the rest of the interface isn't that bad and that the alternatives are worse.
Re:Crunched
by mattmaroon on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @09:56PM
(#77304)
I agree. I'd be curious to see what you think of ours.
I was quite happy with Yahoo Games when I was a Windows user. I played Chess, Hearts, Euchre, and more on Yahoo Games. Once I had any problems with Java applets, however, Yahoo Games became a casualty of those problems. I literally spent at least an hour a day on Yahoo Games before switching to Linux. At that point, Yahoo's technology got in the way and I looked for non-Java alternatives. Unless you have no chance of having non-Java competition (I'm thinking of my local gas company here), it would really be a shame to lose potential users because of your technology choice.
Also, your goal in a startup is not to make it easy for you to code, but to make it easy for your users to play. (You only do the former where it assists with the latter.) Java does not accomplish that. People don't want to piss with JRE. It is a bloated nightmare that crashes people's systems, nags them about updates, slows down bootup, etc.
Everyone has Flash. In fact, more people have flash than javascript (turned on) making it the most commonly accepted environment. It and AJAX are really the only acceptable choices for a live draft.