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The tragedy of running an old Node project

(abdisalan.com)
272 points abdisalan | 8 comments | 18 Nov 24 18:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.426s | source | bottom
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mvkel ◴[18 Nov 24 19:03 UTC] No.42175730[source]▶
> time to run it after not touching it for 4 years

> Two hours of my life gone...

Two hours of work after 4 years sounds ... perfectly acceptable?

And it would have run perfectly right away if the node version was specified, so a good learning, too

This feels like making a mountain out of a mole hill

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ivan_gammel ◴[19 Nov 24 13:19 UTC] No.42183093[source]▶
I still can open my decade-old Java projects, run build with modern Maven/JDK and get working code - in a few minutes. Two hours of dancing with a drum doesn’t feel acceptable to me.
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1. andai ◴[19 Nov 24 14:54 UTC] No.42184062[source]▶
I spent an hour or two figuring out how to even download Java, whether I need to give Oracle my home address, use a third party JDK etc. Then it turned out the standard built in GUI library I needed was no longer standard or built in. (I also used it ten years ago and it was a much better experience then.)
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2. ivan_gammel ◴[19 Nov 24 15:07 UTC] No.42184202[source]▶
Well, I would spend probably similar time to get started on Pascal, which I used last time in the previous century. I would not blame Pascal for it though.
3. trinix912 ◴[19 Nov 24 17:03 UTC] No.42185636[source]▶
JavaFX? I’ve been there too, had to install it with maven and waste a few hours getting the maven xml just right for it to bundle the entire thing into a runnable jar (one that doesn’t require shipping extra files). Not the most convenient, but I get that they wanted to split it off the JDK release cycle.
4. Suppafly ◴[19 Nov 24 19:34 UTC] No.42187229[source]▶
>I spent an hour or two figuring out how to even download Java, whether I need to give Oracle my home address, use a third party JDK etc.

My son found a disk with some of my old java project from college 20 years ago and that's about what it took to run them, first figuring out how to even download java and then making some minor changes to get them running. I think we gave up trying to get the actual applet based ones to run.

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5. sorokod ◴[19 Nov 24 21:29 UTC] No.42188287[source]▶
To save you time in the future:

https://adoptium.net/en-GB/

Haven't used javaFX for a while but this is worth a shot

https://openjfx.io

6. banku_brougham ◴[22 Nov 24 02:38 UTC] No.42210676[source]▶
applet. thats a name i havent heard in a very long time.
7. fian ◴[22 Nov 24 12:46 UTC] No.42213380[source]▶
I know this is a late response, but for anyone curious you would need to use an official Oracle or Sun JDK/JRE from Java 8 or older. OpenJDK doesn't include support for applets.

You also need a browser that has NPAPI. IE 11 was the most modern browser I am aware of that still supported applets.

The old GUI framework mentioned in the GP might have been Swing. It is still included in most JDKs and allows for cross platform desktop GUI application development with no other dependencies outside the JDK. Finding documentation on how to do GUIs in Swing is getting increasingly difficult though.

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8. Suppafly ◴[24 Nov 24 02:35 UTC] No.42225535{3}[source]▶
IIRC Oracle makes it really hard to find the download. Admittedly we didn't spend more than an hour or two messing around with all of it and getting the applets to run wasn't a high priority or anything.