What's Missing From Oracle's List of the 25 Greatest Java Apps Ever Written?

On the 25th anniversary of Java, Oracle's director of developer content released a list of the 25 greatest Java apps ever written. This week they shared the responses it got.

"The U.S. National Security Agency was secretly pleased we noticed its Ghidra binary decompilation tool..." The tenor of conversation was both positive and polite. That speaks volumes about the excellent character of Java developers, don't you think? But, developers being who they are, opinions on what should have made the list abounded... Another Twitter commenter said I should have included Cassandra, the Spring Framework, Apache Spark, the Hazelcast open source in-memory data grid, and Apache Kafka....

- Reader Victor Duran suggested a Java app called Swish, which, he said, "made the entire Swedish economy go cashless." Swish handled 25 billion Swedish krona in May 2020; that's a little more than 2.8 billion US dollars. According to a company spokesperson, parts of the back end are written in Java.

- There are many Java games to choose from, of course, but I was called out for not including Runescape and Old School Runescape, two popular Java-based applications that entertain millions to this day...

- As a commenter pointed out, mobile apps for both WordPress and Telegram are written in Java — and Telegram's encrypted, self-destruct chat feature makes it one of the most popular apps in the world with more than 400 million active users....

- In the final category, several researchers at CERN pointed out that some Large Hadron Collider (LHC) software and other data analytics software are written in Java. That includes the LHC Logging Service, which captures and stores the LHC data. As you can see in this 2006 paper, the LHC Logging Service has been using Java for many years.

Re: WordPress

[slazzy]

Wordpress = php not java

Re:

[John Allsup]

I think they mean the Wordpress app that you run on your mobile, not the PHP that runs Wordpress websites.

Re:

[Tailhook]

Blaming WordPress on Java... wow.

Java isn't the most loved programming language around, but it doesn't deserve that sort of defamation.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

Wordpress without Java is like a fish without a bicycle.

Re: WordPress

[slazzy]

TFA is just talking about the Android app to edit wordpress posts. Wordpress is actually written in PHP.

Re:

[znrt]

which is not really java, even if oracle sued anyway.

(sorry for contributing to all this nonsense. i'm weak)

They forgot all the set top boxes for cable boxes

[bobstreo]

And about as "good" as any of the other items on the list.

Re: They forgot all the set top boxes for cable bo

[ToasterMonkey]

Java Bad

They forgot the most important one

[93 Escort Wagon]

Oracle’s Java uninstaller.

Re:

[znrt]

which isn't a java app either.

but could be invoked from java, and is a public service after all. admitted.

Re:

[mobby_6kl]

which isn't a java app either.

This seems to support the notion that there are no good Java apps. The only other famous Java app I can think of is Minecraft and it isn't helping matters either.

Last in the list

[Alworx]

Last in the list: Java Update

Re:

[iggymanz]

Yes I've seen hundreds. Java moves money and makes business go.

Re:

[iggymanz]

er no. either money is moved correctly and accurately, or it is not.

Some shitheads at work wrote a Drupal php store front end that dealt with another e-com system but they stored money and qty as text fields. No lie, some languages attract the shitheads who should never touch real business.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[iggymanz]

It's done by library, java has BigDecimal and NumberFormat for output.

Another pointless list

[UnknownSoldier]

Why focus on Java? User's don't give a fuck what language the app was written in.

The fact that it took until version 8 to get unsigned types tells me it was written for people clueless about algorithms and programming. A poor math analogy would be like mathematicians ignoring negative numbers. Whether or not IF you need them depends on context.

Re:

[whh3]

Because the article was written for the 25th anniversary of the language!

Re:

[UnknownSoldier]

No one gives a fuck how old Java is.

All the "cool kids" are using Rust or Javaschit.

Re: Another pointless list

[Z00L00K]

When I did see the article a lot of what was listed was frameworks, but they come and go quite a bit and are useless without an application on top.

Tomcat is probably one of the top contenders, even though it's a framework too, it can work standalone to serve documents 'as is' as well.

But when looking at 'greatest' you shall also consider that size don't makes a certain application or app great. Maybe some of the great implementations are found in Google app store. And then it's not the number of downloads t

Re:

[greytree]

Some programs only exist because the developers could use C++'s low-level memory handling to make them run fast.
But some programs only exist because the developers could use Java's garbage-collected memory handling to make them easy to write.
Some programs only exist because the developers could use Python's simple, effective syntax.
PHP can fuck off.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Don't forget how for a the longest time C++ tooling sucked compared to Java tooling.

Hellow Swing

[greytree]

They missed that 57-line Hello World that everyone learning Swing had to learn to write.

Re:

[systemd-anonymousd]

And compiled with maven, it downloaded the Internet's entire collection of XML files every time you ran it.

Re: Hellow Swing

[stevenfuzz]

This

Bluray, Tomcat, Android?

[bill_mcgonigle]

each have more than a few users.

Android

[tigersha]

All andoid apps are written in java. Most anyways

Re: Android

[Z00L00K]

Not all, some are Kotlin instead, others are actually native in C/C++. But going native is a bit risky.

There can still be quality apps that are highly rated and well used by many that can be considered great. The size isn't a greatness indicator.

Re:

[HeadSoft]

These days, plenty of apps are written in C# using Unity. It eventually becomes Java bytecode IIRC, but it's not Java.

WTF? Where is jEdit??!?

[Qbertino]

An unbelievably awesome Open Source Project that trailblazed editor features we take for granted these days. That it's on this list is a big misshap.

The JAVA APP that saved Open Source

[McLae]

Off in the corners of specialized software is a program called JMRI (Java Model Railroad Interface).

In the early 200's a patent troll tried to collect on a patent of JMRI technology. Which JMRI had deployed as open source.

Turns out the troll copied the source, deleted the open source references and sold it as his own software.

He then sued JMRI for royalties on the code he stole.

The win by JMRI helped set legal precedent for slapping down trolls when they steal and rebrand code.

Open source is alive today in part because of JMRI.

(I use this software several times a week!)

For more information google "JMRI Lawsuit"

Thomas

DeSoto, TX

Re:

[backslashdot]

In the early 200's a patent troll tried to collect on a patent of JMRI technology. Which JMRI had deployed as open source.

Wow, that was a long time ago. Was it written for the Antikythera mechanism?

Uuum ... Android?

[BAReFO0t]

I don't get how that's still missing.

Re: Uuum ... Android?

[RazorSharp]

Because Oracle.

Slashdotted!

[tdelaney]

I haven't seen a slashdotting in I don't know how long.

Someone seeing this might think that Oracle doesn't know anything about enterprise-level website development.

Re: Slashdotted!

[Z00L00K]

Today Oracle don't know anything, they just buy and license property rights.