Java: A Looser in my Browser

I was checking out a new startup noticed in the never ending stream of same reported by TechCrunch.  Its name is Fuser, I was intrigued.  I headed over to the site and blamo, ran into the reason I would never return.  Java.

I was a Java programmer for ages (or at least what passes for “ages” in the computer business).  I started out coding in pre-Java 1.0 and my god was it a rocky road.  As the platform matured, it became clear what it was good at and what it wasn’t.

It was, and is, a reasonable choice for server side coding (especially when multi- platform support is a concern).  Where it isn’t a success is the client side.  Browser applets were miserable to develop, rarely worked, and required client side code (the JVM) that wasn’t available by default in all platforms – I’m looking at you Windows – and was non-trivial for users to install.  In the late 90′s (and even early 2000′s) Java was really still only viable client choice for many in-browser UI scenarios, but it was avoided by most developers I knew at all costs.

I remember working very hard to make rudimentary DHTML (that’s a precursor to your AJAX, for you hip kids of today) behaviors work.  All to avoid needing a heavy handed UI in Java.  Now, the technology palette available to the web UI developer is amazingly rich: AJAX, Flash/Apollo, Silverlight are just the front runners in a very busy space.

With this new options available to any web developer that bothers to learn one of these newer (they’re really not even “new” anymore) technologies, the interaction options inside the browser are almost limitless.  So, in this new age, why oh why do people bother to still use Java Applets?

For the most part, they’ve become a rare oddity.  I almost never come across one unless you’re on some backwater real estate site (this industry seems to have been sold a bill of goods by some vendor for showing 360 picture views and walk through’s in an Applet), or some crusty old web application that is hasn’t been updated in a decade.

As such, after my more recent Windows rebuilds (and certainly now that some of my boxes are on Vista) there is no longer a JVM on my personal machines.  If you bother to use Java on your site, I – more often than not – will just depart it as soon as I realize your technology requirement, never to return again.

The Java Applet era is over, any web developer that doesn’t get that is in trouble.