[Note: I've reposted this (with minor edits) as my original post got accidentally deleted. Thanks to Google cache]

Why is it? Why is it that Java applets -despite having the first mover advantage - achieved little traction. While Flash - a tool which targets graphic designers originally - continue to gain mindshare, and is now a serious player in the application space with Flex?

Perhaps it is because applets suffer from slow start up times. Maybe it is because applets crashes browsers when they become non-responsive. Perhaps it is due to heavy resource usage.

None of these are Java’s fault.

The latest client-side offering from Sun - JavaFX - improves the language, but does nothing about the underlying JVM itself (more about JRE 1.6u10 later). JavaFX is a fine language, once you get past the YAML syntax. Unfortunately, the JVM itself is the issue. JavaFX or not, Sun will not see JavaFX overtake Flash on most web pages.

When Flash 1.0 came out, it supported streaming bytecodes, and movies played immediately. JVM’s design requires all libraries to be downloaded, and then verified before playing in the sandbox. [Edit 18-Sep-2008: lispnik pointed out that this has been addressed in Java 6 Update 10]

The JVM implements share-nothing class libraries¹, every new JVM process requires run-time libraries to be loaded up separately. This adds another block of run-up time before any screen is visible.

This makes me wonder if the JVM has a fundamentally flawed approach when the use-case is to run in a browsed environment, i.e. where people are moving from web page to web page quickly, and only having a taste of your application, and sometimes, involuntarily, as in the case of a banner ad¹.

For browsing environments, I contend that Sun should have bundled some sort of interpreter in the VM, that can process a streamable language, in the manner of Flash. Sure, it is not Java, but it would have guided the evolution of the JVM.

Looking after little details matter. If Sun had cared about applets, and tuned it for lower resource usage, we would have arrived at MultiVMs and OSGI years ago.

The Java camp has a reputation for dogma, e.g. rejecting delegates in favour of anonymous inner classes, static methods instead of standalone functions. There are promising signs of change. Invokedynamic is nearly here - thanks to realization that the JVM needs to support dynamic languages.

Java 6 Update 10 saw a flurry of updates to the JVM precisely to support JavaFX better. This goes to show how little work has been put in to over the past ten years. It is not until Sun - with back against the wall - and a big competitor eating it’s lunch for breakfast, that Sun finally pays attention.

It is late. But not too late. Sun engineers ought to ask themselves this question. “JVM is everywhere. What is Flash doing right but we aren’t?”

 Reposted Comments

:

1. No. 2 — September 4th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
2. Sun engineers ought to ask themselves this question. “JVM is everywhere. What is Flash doing right but we aren’t?”
3. Engineers? Strategists rather.
4. Matt Grommes writes:
   No. 3 — September 5th, 2008 at 12:44 am I believe the newest update of the JVM (included with the JavaFX package) includes a rework where it will only download what that app needs to start up, then it downloads other libraries as needed later. So this at least seems taken care of.

 

¹Update 5 Sept, I was wrong. See this
²Incidentally, addressing this use-case on the server-side could be a boon for Java on shared hosters. I would like to see the JVM be a viable competitor to PHP. See Matthieu Riou.

Update:Looks like the post has been linked from DZone. Tell me what you think? What kind of projects would you choose Java applets over Flash or AJAX?

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After all these years, Java’s applet has not seen much adoption, while Flash continue to gain mindshare. Applets suffer from slow start up times, crashing browsers, heavy resource usage. The latest ’solution’ from Sun is to keep the java libraries in the disk cache.

The latest client-side offering from Sun - JavaFX - improves the language, but does nothing about the underlying JVM itself (more about JRE 1.6u10 later). JavaFX is a fine language, once you get past the YAML syntax. Unfortunately, the JVM itself it the issue. JavaFX or not, Sun will not see JavaFX overtake Flash on most web pages.

When Flash 1.0 came out, it supported streaming bytecodes, and movies played immediately. JVM’s design requires all libraries to be downloaded, and then verified before playing in the sandbox.

The JVM implements share-nothing class libraries¹, every new JVM process requires run-time libraries to be loaded up separately. This adds another block of run-up time before any screen is visible.

The JVM has a fundamentally flawed approach when the use-case is to run in a browsed environment, i.e. where people are moving from web page to web page quickly, and only having a taste of your application, and sometimes, involuntarily, as in the case of a banner ad¹.

For browsing environments, I contend that Sun should have bundled some sort of interpreter in the VM, that can process a streamable language, in the manner of Flash. Sure, it is not Java, but it would have guided the evolution of the JVM. For example, we would have arrived at MultiVMs and OSGI much faster.

The Java camp has a reputation for dogma, e.g. rejecting delegates in favour of anonymous inner classes, static methods instead of standalone functions. There are promising signs of change. Invokedynamic and Annotations are nearly here, thanks to realization that the JVM needs to support dynamic languages, and thanks to competition from the .Net camp.

Sun engineers ought to ask themselves this question. “JVM is everywhere. What is Flash doing right but we aren’t?”

¹Update 5 Sept, I was wrong. See this
²Incidentally, addressing this use-case will also address resource usage on shared hosters, making Java a viable competitor to PHP. See Matthieu Riou.