Oracle's Ambitious Plan For Client-Side Java

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.'"

Re:licenses

[Anonymous Coward]

We thought (signed) Java applets would be a sound method to get cross-platform client software onto desktops. What we found is that the browser plugin from Sun/Oracle and even OpenJDK is buggy and unstable on most platforms. We get assertion failures out of the plugin loader that have been listed as bugs on Sun's tracker for almost a decade, as well as bizarre GUI related exceptions. Things seem to get worse the more you use the applet/browser interfaces, for example to access the cookie store or the page DOM.

It crashes or hangs Firefox and Seamonkey on Linux x64 perhaps 10% of the time the applet loads. It crashes Safari on Mac OS X over 50% of the time. It seems most stable, but still not foolproof, on older Windows systems.

Re:*yawn*

[santosh.k83]

"Sure, Java supports more platforms, but it's resource and memory hog, insecure (there's tons of Java exploits out there but none for .NET!)..." Since installing Windows 7 (about a week back) I've had to apply more than 8-10 patches for .NET "security vulnerabilities" and "exploits" already.

rewrite swing from scratch or stop right now

[canoeberry]

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. No, it's not ruby or python, but then again those languages are slow as thick shit in comparison. 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, like Eclipse for example. That thing uses 500M of real memory for what!? Displaying a UI, edit three or four files, a console window ... I mean, this is 500M we're talking about. I blame Swing and the fact that its components are based on AWT Component, which is a huge memory hog with about 60 instance variables - holy cow, I thought I was exaggerating but it's close enough (53 + 13 because JComponent extends Container not Component). 66 * 8 = 512 bytes although not all elements are pointers I admit. Awesome! (not). I wonder if things would have been different if they didn't completely screw up Swing. AWT was done in about a week in 1995, it's OK that it wasn't perfect. But there is no excuse for Swing to suck so badly.

Re:rewrite swing from scratch or stop right now

[Anonymous Coward]

Java just allows for shitty code. I have written C++ apps. They all used somewhere between 2 and 10 megs of RAM. I wrote a small Swing GUI with one text pane and 4 buttons, it uses 50-70 megs of RAM. WTF? Then, I wrote an entire enterprise app in SWING and man that thing uses a TON of memory....somewhere around 256-500 megs depending on if someone has been using it a lot or not. Not to mention now I work on J2EE code, which is just inefficient as shit. Our web frontend is so slow and all the UI guys say it's the backend and I keep telling them it's the ORM layer and there is nothing I can do about it except add indexes. Eclipselink sucks balls. God I miss the days of C++ when I managed the memory I created. I felt so fulfilled deleting it. Now I can just create objects willy nilly and not know the consequences in the JVM. Fucking inefficient garbage collection. I've watch programs thrash pulling in gigs of RAM from the DB and trying to garbage collect over and over. It's pathetic. Long live efficient languages. I am not a bad developer, btw. I am senior level, btw. I have worked with grad students and learned from the best software engineers out there. Don't call me a newb you Java fanboys. I've worked with it for 10 years now and generally like the language but hate the performance.

Re:Time to move on

[leenks]

SWT is awful. At least Swing is pretty clean, and logical. SWT is often utterly insane - look inside the code for proof of that. Swing is also totally extensible. SWT is not (the number of classes that state the class is not final but must not be extended is quite impressive). I say this as someone working on a small (450k semicolons) SWT/RCP application which integrates components written in Swing, JOGL and Processing.org.