Oracle deprecating Java applets in Java 9

[1] When Sun officially announced Java I was the guy who wrote the applet that powered the home page. You needed HotJava or the beta Netscape Communicator to actually see it :-)

However you'd be surprised how many large or giant orgs (inc. governments) are still utilising Oracle Forms and Reports, as a mainstay. We're talking about thousands of these horrible forms going back to the 1990s.

Oracle has announced some kind of vague "way forward" for the technology but as of yet they've been light on details. They have tried to replace Forms and Reports several times but with limited success (partly because of previous investments/sunk costs, and partly because Oracle licensing costs are horrifying).

Of course they sadly ended as a staggering failure.

Epic loading times of the JVM were the practical death knell. A grand-canyon of a security hole was the deal sealer.

Off topic: Anyone else think the Oracle blog is overdue for a re-design? Its aesthetics are as outdated as Java Applets.

So, I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, as someone who’s spent significant parts of the last decade developing UIs that included a Java applet, the experience has become horrible as it has become more and more troublesome to actually run Java code in a browser. It sucks for developers, and it sucks for users. None of us will miss that hassle.

On the other hand, except for when browser developers or Oracle have actively changed something, I’ve had applets doing interesting visualisations in GUIs where the code has worked fine for many years, with no changes needed other than bona fide new development. Such longevity is generally desirable, but it really matters if the GUI in question is served from an embedded device where taking something out of service to update firmware is an exercise measured not in minutes but in months.

Unfortunately, browser-native alternatives such as SVG just aren’t ready to replace those Java-based visualisations with the same degree of portability and longevity yet. I could write down a list of confirmed SVG bugs I’ve run into just in this week while building a new generation of one of those systems, and it would fill half my screen. I could file some bug reports, but it turns out that sometimes people already have, and they’ve been dismissed with WORKSFORME despite several other people reporting similar problems. And that’s just functionality that is theoretically supported, where the browsers tick all the summary boxes on sites like caniuse, before we even get into things like having at least three completely different techniques for doing animation but none that works everywhere. It’s also ignoring areas where even though the technology “works”, the performance is so bad when you scale things up that some browsers can’t cope.

I am not looking forward to the amount of time I’m going to be wasting over the next few years working around the endless browser incompatibilities and breaking updates, where the old plugin-based code would probably have just carried on working if no-one had undermined it. They’ve done it with Flash giving way to HTML5 media elements. Now they’re doing it with Java giving way to the likes of canvas and SVG. And yet I can’t help feeling that these are backward steps for those of us whose job is to build working web sites and apps, and will continue to be until these new technologies are a lot more mature and standardised than they are today.