Oracle's Ambitious Plan For Client-Side Java 292
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that the real news out of this year's JavaOne is Oracle's ambitious plan to revitalize Java on the desktop, the Web, and mobile devices. 'It's been tempting to assume that Oracle, with its strong enterprise focus, would ignore the client in favor of data center technologies such as Java EE. This week, we learned that's not the case. In fact, the real news from this year's JavaOne conference in San Francisco may not be Oracle's plans for Java 8 and 9, but the revelation that Oracle is gearing up for a new, sustained push behind Java for the desktop, the Web, and mobile devices. If it can succeed in its ambitious plans, the age of client-side Java could be just beginning.'"
licenses (Score:5, Informative)
I have a set of systems I am building that are used by a store chain. It's my line of products, one of the components is a store management system that is used in the stores. Every piece is server/client, but in this component the client is a Java swing application that also can be used as an applet (that's the good part about Java, with minimum work you can have it working as an applet if it works as an application.)
So I know that most people on /. are derisive about such solutions, but I am moving the stores from Window platform to GNU/Linux (Ubuntu actually). Of-course it's possible to build everything in C and C++, etc., but when the entire solution is java with every component on every server / client, even though most clients here are thin, that run in a browser of choice, using Java as a client is really the most logical thing.
Every component is compatible with each other, the communications between components are all built in exactly the same manner, be it a server-server or server-full client.
The important thing is that moving from Windows to GNU/Linux is easier, because the look and feel stays almost the same.
The one real problem for me is actually some driver for certain types of devices, like zebra thermal printers and such, but that's not a problem with Java itself, that was a problem with moving the clients from Windows to GNU/Linux (haven't figured this out yet, so one of the computers in stores is still Windows, because the configuration and font setup software supplied with the Zebra printers is for Windows.)
I can accept the hate, that the Java solution may not be wonderful or uber-cool or whatever the current feelings are about what people hate today, but the point is that it's working. If I couldn't get it to work, I would have had no choice but to go with something else, but that would require extra work, to get it all communicating with the server sides, that are Java based.
The speed of this application totally depends on the data model, database work, algorithms and communications, but the Java GUIs themselves are not presenting any major problems. If I want to, I can even style the main frame of the window with anything, any kind of graphic that doesn't look like a normal window, this works with JNI, but I don't really need that in this project.
I have used this in a browser as an applet and I have used this to communicate over the Internet, not just within the stores themselves, which is an interesting feature.
So can somebody tell me what they think I should be on a look out for here? Is Java going to blow the fuses or are the tables going to catch on fire?
Re:rewrite swing from scratch or stop right now (Score:4, Informative)
Why all the freakishly negative comments about one of the best languages to come along in a while? Super blazingly fast and fun to program. ... Anyway, if Java is going to succeed on the desktop it has to be possible to write apps which don't take up 500M of RAM
Java is a trade off that uses excessive memory usage to allow you to 'have fun programming' (write shit code) and run almost a fast a C/C++ and have byte code that will run on multiple platforms.
Its inherent to the language to use heaps of memory (needing a VM and using conservative GC) and have slow load times populating that memory. Is a language that has a niche (only good for running on a desktop with 4Gigs or more of ram) not a brilliant language. Probably the main reason its hated, is its owned by Oracle though. You cannot rewrite Java and have the extra memory usage disappear.