Java Desktop Failures

Didn't Java fail spectacularly in the desktop application space?

On the desktop, Java is the obvious missing elephant in the room. Java was popular, the non-GUI parts of Java were fast enough, but there were no good GUI libraries. Java continues to be anathema on the desktop because of the number of crappy apps written with Sun's officially blessed UI library, Swing. It didn't have to be that way. I've written a pretty snappy app using the Eclipse platform, which is based on SWT, which uses platform-specific code. In retrospect it's clear that Sun's writ

Imagine there would be a language that would compile to proper bytecode (not JS), that would run on a standardized platform which is present on almost every computer, that is mature, sandboxed, and actually pretty fast. Oh, wait, that already exists and is called Java.Java has gotten a bad rep lately due to some high-profile drive-by-malware bugs. But if the java codebase would have gotten the same intensive care that the webkit codebase got, this would no longer be an issue.Many people re

The biggest problem with Java was that it sucked. Java took too long (and too much RAM) to initialize, was too slow to add features, and had too poor developer tools to become the runtime for the web.Instead Flash took that spot! Only because Flash eventually also ended up sucking too bad (on mobile) did we get the Javascript revolution.If Java sucked less and developed at the same pace as Flash did, but was open enough that the browsers could implement their own runtime rep

I’ve always wondered why Java didn’t take off more for desktop apps. Was it a compromised user experience vs native apps? Was Swing bad to work with? Did Web 2.0 come in and steal the show right when it was starting to gain traction?

Someone flagged the comment before I could post my response, but here it was (re: Google didn't save Java on the client):Java on the server was not in decline, but Java on the desktop was declining, had declined. Applets were dead, very few success stories around Java Web Start. And the main three 'consumer' success stories for Java on the frontend were Limewire, Minecraft, and IntelliJ/Eclipse. As a consumer facing technology, Java was a complete failure. No sane person w

Java in the browser used to be called applets, no? Anyways, it failed, thought that probably had a lot to do with: JavaScript being more accessible (still is) and the security model for applets (JAAS) being rather lame (it was, and still is, and it continues to exist in spite of applets being gone because JAAS metastasized).

I'm not sure how it's for others, but for me there was a perception issue with java applets on the web in the mid 2000s:Java applets loading on a website started as a gray rectangle, which loaded very slowly, and sometimes failed to initialize with an "uninited" error. Whenever you opened a website with a java applet (like could happen with some math or physics related ones), you'd go "sigh" as your browser's UI thread itself halted for a whileFlash

This article seems quite off. First, it conflates browser and desktop. Yes, applets died an early and deserved death. That is different from what happened with desktop apps.A univeral GUI (e.g. Swing) was wrong-headed. I don't actually know what happened after people moved away from Swing. But even in the time range TFA discusses, Intellij IDEA, an IDE written in Java, was a success. It has always been multi-platform, and never had worse than acceptable performance in my experience. It h

Those who forget desktop Java will be doomed to repeat it.For those of you who aren't old enough to have been around, Sun initially pushed Java as a "write once, run everywhere" GUI language. It quickly became clear that Java applications were ugly and terrible everywhere, even in the primitive days of X11R5, when programs used a mixture of Xt, Motif, Qt, GTK, and raw X11 protocol (xv was awesome). Having a Java program for some task was worse than having no program at all, s