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Comment by BetaCygni | Hacker News Reader

It's not a question of $ or of liking MS, it is a question of trust. Microsoft can and will suddenly discontinue entire solutions like Silverlight. I know of a company that is in real trouble because they first rewrote their entire application in Silverlight and now have to do it again in HTML5...

Java on the desktop is almost dead due to the horrible JRE by Oracle. On the server and on Android it is alive and well, and the community is big enough to keep it going even if Oracle loses interest. It will also make its return to the desktop one day when someone figures out how to make it suck less, as the language and the available libraries are awesome.

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> It's not a question of $ or of liking MS, it is a question of trust. Microsoft can and will suddenly discontinue entire solutions like Silverlight.

In all fairness all technology companies are like that. Hell even open source groups are like that. If the community disappears why would you continue to invest millions into it when better solutions are coming around the corner? Silverlight, for a while, was absolute king in video streaming (you could squeeze much more quality out of it than flash) but like with everything on the web unless it's strictly standards-based you're going to run the risk of it being discontinued when better standards come around.

I don't think that's really a fair knock against Microsoft.

> It will also make its return to the desktop one day when someone figures out how to make it suck less, as the language and the available libraries are awesome.

Good luck with that; it's going to take a desktop OS who can make a Java GUI framework feel native and not horrible and at this point I don't know why any of them would invest in this.

It might not be fair; it's just that in my mind one moment Microsoft was hyping Silverlight and the next moment they were discontinuing it. That's not a nice way to treat your customers.

What Microsoft should have done is to make it compile to HTML5. Something like SmartGWT is a great way to write interface in Java. It may even be the way the Java ends up on the desktop again.

I always find it a bit puzzling when people blame Microsoft for the death of Silverlight. As an in-browser technology, Silverlight's success depended entirely on the willingness and ability of third-party browsers to support it. It just needed one browser to gain a significant market share and then refuse to play ball to pull the rug right from underneath Silverlight's feet. This is what happened in 2010 when Apple blocked it from the iPhone and the iPad. Sure, that move was aimed at Flash, but Silverlight took collateral damage from which it never recovered. That wasn't something that Microsoft could control.

@Silverlight: are you much better off if you've wrote a Java Applet at the same time ? (I think this was the right thing to do in Java back then)

We were trying to use Java Webstart, but we gave up, because of the fact that some modern browsers just block the Java plugin.

I have to use a Java applet for some customer VPN's I am connecting to and the only browser this works for me is Internet Explorer to connect to those VPNs.

You can still write Winforms applications and this is some really old technique. Maybe you are still able to use MFC, but I haven't tested that in a LONG time.

That's true, but at least Java applets died a natural death instead of being axed.

I checked the history of Silverlight and the first version was released in 2007. jQuery was released in 2006 so Silverlight was a classic case of "too little, too late".

Real Java applications run well nowadays, so much so that you don't notice it's Java (except that you always have to give them more memory...)

And yes, you can still use MFC ;)

suddenly? are you serious? it was dead from the beginning.

that is like saying, o my god, i think the rotting corpse that has been lying in here for 3 months is dead!

I am serious. I didn't concern myself with it a lot, but popularity seemed actually rising (to my annoyance).

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