It's amazing to think that Java applets are a decade old. Why did they never catch on? I think the reasons are, in this order:
1. Most computers are sold without a JRE preinstalled.
2. Sun reached out to developers and not designers.
3. JRE is the wrong platform for applets. If Sun had stepped back and realized they needed a JBE (Java browser edition) which is more along the lines of SVG, Flash, Sparkle, without all the bulk of the JRE; things might be different. Let's face it, applets just need a runtime like Flash: high level visual/audio framework, XML/HTTP communication, and basic (preferably dynamic!) scripting. Flash is popular because it makes eye-candy easy, has a scripting language (JS), and is backed by a great IDE for *designers*. It's almost laughable the lead Sun had on Macromedia, and yet Flash is everywhere and Java applets are rare!
4. Applets need a declarative, preferably XML, UI description format. Doing everything by code is, well, dumb.
5. Sun allowed the name "Javascript" to be used by Netscape, permanently confusing the hell out of everyone in the dot.com boom that didn't deserve to being doing tech stuff because they couldn't understand the difference. (Which was, what, 99% of the people in tech during the dot.com boom?). This confused the hell out of everyone for a long time. The number of developers who have gotten callbacks on resumes and had to explain the difference probably numbers in the tens of thousands.
6. Few compelling demos, probably in large part because of #2 above; i.e. it's hard to build nice applet demos when the entire framework hasn't been thought out for building nice applets
7. Duke looked like a tooth. Just a tiny example of overall bad marketing.
8. If Java had been licensed like OpenSolaris is now, all the above 7 things wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference, and applets would be everywhere. In other words, the hundreds of thousands of open source developers would have contributed to make Java applets what they should have been, instead of praying for necessary tweaks every two years when a new version of the JVM escaped the lab. (Forget the current Mustang process too -- it's too little, too late.) |
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