IMHO applets earned a bad reputation for two main reasons:
1) When the first big size applets appeared, bandwidth still was an issue: it took ages to download them. And they sometimes did not work as expected (not to say they were buggy :-)) because we all lacked experience at that time
2) Ordinary users often had/have problems with terminology: "Java" got mixed up with "JavaScript" and security concerns of the latter where (incorrectly, of course) applied to Java as well. This often led to the (sad) advice of disabling Java in the browser.
Besides these two points, deployment has always been an issue. What happens if not Java runtime is on the target system? The same applies to Web Start, of ourse. I think Sun needs to provide some sort of unified installation process for runtime environments. What I have in mind is a download page at java.com which can be passed arguments that define what virtual machine is needed by a program. This downloadpage should try to determine if Java is already installed and otherwise install the runtime. After download and installation is complete it should redirect the user to the original page so he can then use/download the program that needs the vm. |
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