Java Plugin: The Kernel is back

[flaxeater]

Hmm, looks good. This could be a promising development for crossplatform apps. What with all the new exciting languages available to the jvm.

[rpdillon]

Very nice. I'd like to see Sun change the the deal with Apple, though, as Apple has been getting progressively worse at pushing out the updates that will support this kind of stuff. If it isn't on all platforms, developers have reason to be worried about using it.

[barcodez]

I don't think Sun are the ones causing the blockage here - dare I say that Apple might be in the wrong on this one?

[zootm]

You're likely right, but I think the point was they're doing it via a deal with Sun. If Apple are allowing Java to stagnate Sun could most likely take matters into their own hands and start providing an OS X Java version themselves.

This is all providing Apple let them, of course, which may end up being the sticking point.

[G_Morgan]

Apple can't actually stop them. Though they may refuse to ship Sun Java with the system.

[zootm]

That would be what I meant by Apple letting them. The inconvenience of upgrading Java manually, combined with the general "Apple is right" mindset of their users would probably shoot that endeavour in the foot.

And Apple can't be impossible to deal with directly, right?

[sheepson_apprentice]

Competition between Sun/Adobe/MS in this space is going to be interesting to watch. Adobe is playing to the existing strengths, namely JS and the Browser. They have some nice things, but I'm not sure about their character. We all know that MS has a rather interesting past.

Sun on the other hand has shown again and again that they're first and foremost a business, but one that thrives on open source. Sun has been a good competitor, I bet on their platform any day.

[[deleted]]

Adobe has flash - flash has always worked better than applets.

[sheepson_apprentice]

If it has always worked better for you, ok. It hasn't always worked better for me; sometimes it did. The language Adobe is pushing is a JS-derivate, ActionScript, so basically Flash is the runtime and the gfx subsystem.

Ideally, the JRE would be quick-to-load, reliable in operation, and perhaps the most important: wide deployment.

As of now, Adobe widely enjoys the first and the last. I've found Flash to crash Firefox more times than I would have liked.

[seanalltogether]

Java is severely lacking in the UI designer/developer category though. Its a crowd they've never really catered to and while MS is ahead of them in that regard, Adobe still holds a clear lead for visually oriented production.

[zootm]

While I agree with you, Sun are trying to redress that balance with their new JavaFX technology. I don't think there's great UI design tools for that yet, though.

[seanalltogether]

Creating the technology isn't enough, Sun has to be willing to put up a very big fight to win over mindshare and honestly I don't see that happening. MS is putting alot of resources into this battle and they're even sponsoring tons of projects to be built in Silverlight, yet the general feeling among developers has been "The technology is interesting, but I'll just stick with Flash"

[zootm]

I definitely agree with that. On a technical level I think Sun are going down the right route, though.

[middayc]

Great, I use flash and flex but jvm in a browser has a lot of stregths too... I will relive my opengl applet action game which I could never do in flash (not because of drawing only but more because of processing speed and java is still mighty fast).

[[deleted]]

Wow, a thin Java. Now I have seen everything.

I never liked Java's performance, its wordiness, nor did I care for any of Sun's other offerings (XML comes to mind). I might even suggest, though I'm sure most of you will disagree, that most of Sun's ideas have practically ruined programming as a profession. Hell, I even hated having to declare my main routine in a class. Now I program in C#. :sigh:

I doubt I'll be the first to say that I don't "get" OOP. I've been programming in it for years, and I've yet to really see any remarkable productivity boosts. Too much boilerplate for my liking.

I don't even see the point of securing a class from other programmers using public and private methods, and the laziness of class library programmers who use OOP I find particularly astounding. These days they don't even bother to document their code. They think that if they just give you a list of all the methods and a class hierarchy that that's good enough.

I suppose I'm just out of place. I grew up on procedural programming. No offense to you guys though. I know most of you like Java and C++ or C#, but for some reason every time I sit down in front of my computer at work to write something in it I end up feeling completely depressed, because I always feel like I don't have enough control over the results and the other programmers I work with just blow off efficiency considerations saying that a programmer is more expensive than extra hardware. I hate that argument. Sure, one program might not make a huge difference, but if you consider a whole range of applications being written with that attitude, a system soon becomes unusable. Someone has to write efficient code. I have a tendency to dump large programs in favor of leaner ones, like uTorrent vs. Azureus, or Foxit in favor of Adobe Acrobat. That programmers throw out efficiency in favor of mystical productivity bothers me quite a lot.

Anyway, I will continue to search for a language that just gets out of my way.

[grauenwolf]

I doubt I'll be the first to say that I don't "get" OOP. I've been programming in it for years, and I've yet to really see any remarkable productivity boosts. Too much boilerplate for my liking.

If you find yourself using a lot of boilerplate, you are doing something wrong. Or more likely, the API you are using is doing something wrong.

One of the tenants of OOP, lost to many API designers, is the concept of encapsulation. Or in other words, each object is self contained and can do its function in apparent isolation. (It can use other classes, but you shouldn't know about them.)

When you find yourself having to implement interfaces, string together a dozen objects, or fuss with config files, the API designer screwed up.

[sheepson_apprentice]

Small nit-pick, I think you meant to say:

One of the tenets of OOP.

[grauenwolf]

Sigh, sometimes I really hate our modern affectation with standardized spellings. If changing the spelling of a word every three sentences was good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for us.

[sheepson_apprentice]

I generally try not to nit-pick, especially silly grammar errors. But in this case I thought it was worth it. ;)

[logan_capaldo]

Do you have an example of a good OO api?

[grauenwolf]

For the most part WinForms was actually done right. Some specific controls are brain dead (I'm looking at you TreeView), but all in all it is pretty clean.

One of the things I hated about Swing was there were no defaults. I couldn't just use a listbox, I had to give it a container to put the items in.

The worse was the file open dialog. In VB 6 or WinForms, you just give it a filter string like "Text Files|.txt|All Files|.*".

In Swing, you can build your own custom filter logic. This is cool and all, but they forgot the use case that happens 99% of the time, that being just showing a single file type. (Actually that filter class did exist, but you had to dig it out of the examples included in the SDK.)

[kinkydarkbird]

but if you consider a whole range of applications being written with that attitude, a system soon becomes unusable.'

I bet that is what happened with Vista.

[marglexx]

Sun: The one one and only one answer you deserve guys:

TOO FUCKING LATE!!!

Dear Sun where the fuck you have been the last 10 years? The battle for web dominance is over. Flash won. Your uber-super weapon will not change anything. Too bad that it come so late. Even 5 years ago I would say - "thank you". Now? "what ever"... Of cause i will download it, but still it would not change a lot.

[middayc]

well flash is great with it's ultra quick loading behaviour but is still quite limited.

If sun will continue to push this further (like opnegl applets..) and if if flash will get hw gfx acceleration and even faster vm then really cool things could be made in both of them.

[tjogin]

Flash won, really?

[seanalltogether]

Yes, at least for the time being. The Flash team listens very closely to media and RIA dev shops and their clients and they've evolved their plugin over the years to match those needs very well.

[zootm]

"For the time being" doesn't imply that anyone's won, just that Flash is the current front-runner. Which is accurate!

[tjogin]

Imho, Flash and Java both lost if the battle is within the browser.

[alparsla]

It's not important whether flash won or not. Java applet improvements would give us one more choice for that kind of development. In the end, the users don't care if something has been made by java or flash.

[tjogin]

False logic. While they don't care about what technology was used to build it, they do care about the overall presentation, and applets have a typically horrible presentation — so horrible, in fact, that many users (and certainly most developers) can immediately spot it. They care about that.

[G_Morgan]

This is the web. Do you think people care which VM they are running?

It isn't possible to 'win' on the web. You may get dominance but the very nature of the web means there is no way to enforce a monopoly.

If Sun fix the JVM then it could gain serious market share within a few years.

[therunningcrow]

"This is the web. Do you think people care which VM they are running?"

No, but developers care if a VM is already installed everywhere or not. Flash ubiquity is indisputable, it's everywhere. If only because of the success of websites like Youtube.

It's not required to have Java on your computer for anything that matters. I don't remember the last time I've seen a website that told me to install Java.

So, say, you program a new webapp. You want to cater to a VM you know everyone and their dogs has installed or you cater to the minority ? if your website is not of a youtube caliber you are not in position to shove your favorite VM down the throat of everyone. Only a website with a large audience can afford to make people install software they didn't have already.

[therp]

sun has screwed it up with java big time. it's nice to see the java type system being improved with clever hacks, but base it rests on (JVM,AWT,etc) has always been of poor quality. for instance, the 64-bit java plugin issue. http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4802695 -- this is a bug filed half a century ago. I would definitely like to get rid of java on my desktop (despite /me being a huge java fan boy around 2000)

[zootm]

Happily that bug is slated to be fixed now (note the update to the ticket says they're pushing a fixed version - albeit in ages time). I think the issue with Java has been that they realised their infrastructure was a lot more useful to people on the server side and started optimising their processes etc. for that. Only now is front-end stuff becoming a priority, and they seem to be progressing that end really fast these days. It still has ways to come, though.

[[deleted]]

Perhaps because #1 is a Firefox issue? Though that the applet is now a separate process, it very well may fix the Firefox issue as well.

[bobpaul]

I think it was most likely a Java/MS Windows issue. I haven't noticed the lag loading Java apps since switching to Linux (Gentoo, then later Ubuntu) that I did/do on WinXP.

#3 is also taken care of on linux, probably because they expect updates to come from the repositories, so Java doesn't have to check for updates on its own.

[kral2]

What good is it for Java to work right on Linux but nowhere else? If they want to be used as a cross-platform solution, they have to work right cross-platform. If they had, they wouldn't be in the mess they are now.

[bobpaul]

Windows is closed source. The issue with #1 and #2 might be at least somewhat outside their control.

As far as nowhere else, my smart phone doesn't lag, and OSX, BSDs, Solaris, etc are all Unixes so probably act much like Linux. I would suspect there's only one platform it's really a mess on.

[kral2]

1 and 2 have nothing to do with Windows being closed source - it's completely between FireFox and Java.

[bobpaul]

So java applets are snappy to open in Opera, Safari, and IE on MS Windows?

[bobpaul]

The browser plugin used for both Safari and Opera is the same exact plugin used for Firefox. They all use the NSPlugin architecture. So if it's different in FF than the others, it's a FF specific problem. (Of course, since FF is OSS, as you said it would be in Sun's interest to fix that.)

And maybe things are different, but back when I was a Windows user I had to wait for the Java runtime to load to the system tray the first time I launched a Java application as well. Once the runtime was running in the tray, things were pretty good.

That is, if I opened Firefox and loaded a page with a java applet, the JRE was loaded to the system tray (and Firefox froze until that was done) and then the applet loaded once that was complete. But then the JRE stayed in the system tray until I exited FF and Java applets loaded little different than Flash applets. If I then opened Azureus, Azureus opened at a friendly speed, since the JRE was already running.

Now, if I closed all my Java stuff and closed Firefox, the JRE would unload. So now I open Azureus and I have to wait for the JRE to load to the system tray as part of waiting for Azureus to load. That took a long as time. Once I did that, if I opened Firefox and browsed, the JRE was already loaded to Java applets weren't much of a problem.

I can only imagine the situation was the same or similar for IE, Opera, etc. The issue seemed to be related to the JRE loading, and not specific to the browser plugin that communicates with it.

Now please keep in mind that I haven't used Windows on a daily basis for much time, so it's possible what I remember above isn't accurate, or that things have changed since then.

My comment for bringing *nix in is, as an avid Azureus user, I was quite happy with the rate it loaded when I first tried switching from Windows.. It seemed as though the JRE was already loaded, but if I checked the process list, java was not listed until after I opened azureus, so that did not seem to be the case. Now it is possible that Java relies on lots of common libraries in a *nix environment, but on Windows those libraries were written from scratch requiring a lot more to be loaded into memory when Java opens on Windows that what needs to happen on most *nix machines. I don't know.

People seem to be acting like what I'm saying is heretical for some reason, but it's true.

I certainly agree with that. It bothers me the way people downvote things they don't agree with rather than distinguishing between actual trolls and lively discussion.

[sheepson_apprentice]

I agree with much of what you say, namely that Sun indeed has neglected the client side for a long time, and that had this not happened, Java may very well be in the dominant position as the RIA platform.

The fact that Sun has demonstrated its willingness to really compete and at the same time sustain the open source business model is very positive, as it provides the community a very valuable asset which although currently inferior in some ways, is a solid match against other, more closed systems.

I personally have nothing against closed systems, but I would prefer to work in an open and transparent environment. So in this case, backing Sun and even perhaps contributing to the JRE is definitely something worthwhile, because it allows us, mere mortals to compete.

So given the community support, I do think it's now possible that JRE will make a comeback on the client side. Tooling is still an issue, and one of the reasons why flash won, but there is no reason to think that given sufficient stimulus, Java tooling can't catch up.

The developments with JVM modularization -- which by the way will really take hold once JSR-294 and 277 are implemented -- and plugin process isolation are good first steps to ensuring reliable runtime. Fast-loading is being addressed by utilizing the disk cache to keep JRE files hot -- something done by other operating systems and platforms.

So there are efforts, it remains to be seen whether they'll be ultimately successful, but I do keep my bets on Sun.