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Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

(frequal.com)
78 points pjmlp | 1 comments | 08 Dec 25 08:16 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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epistasis ◴[08 Dec 25 08:31 UTC] No.46189804[source]▶
The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time.

I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM.

I hear that now, decades into Java, they have figured out how to launch a program without slowing a computer down for 10+ seconds, but I'll be damned if I find out. There are still so many rough edges that they never even bothered to try to fix about launching a .jar with classpath dependencies. What a mess!

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1. forgotpwd16 ◴[08 Dec 25 12:08 UTC] No.46191314[source]▶
>I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM.

Running one packaged program across every platform. Write once, run anywhere was Sun's slogan for Java. (Though oftentimes ended up being debug anywhere.) As for the slow start part, programs can either be often-launched short-running or seldom-launched forever-running. Assume because enterprise software falls to the later part (and runtime performance > startup time + memory use), focus was there.