But they always end up abused. Everyone hates all of those, and that's good, because it causes people to steer away from them. Instead of throwing our hands up, and giving up, we should continue to try to keep those out.
(And what advantage does WebAssembly have over Java applets? We've been down this road.)
In another 20 years time, we might be at the level of productivity we had 20 years ago with VisualBasic.
Good luck getting Visual Basic adopted as an standard ;)
Someone try to do that with WebKit:
Oh, and I think in webdev, there is a lot of... err... modern creative and innovative guys and gals out there who are always happy to rewrite the world again, because the last week's tech isn't cool anymore.
Has the Java world come up with anything better than Swing or SWT? Because those are the libraries that are in the "stable ecosystem with 20+ years of engineering behind it", and they are terrible. Give me the 'innovative' webdev guys and gals any day.
It has a XML/CSS based way to describe the UI/layout and then lets you link that to your code with annotations. It's not perfect, but it's a lot more pleasant to work with than the likes of SWT.
well said
You say that webdev is Applet 2.0? ok sure, at least it's open and moving instead of EOL'd [1] and the experience is better else wouldn't we all still be using Applets...
[1] http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2443810/oracle-signals-the-en...
My point is we could've embedded JVM in the browser "correctly" instead of reinventing the wheel with another byte code format.
They used syntax trees of program as a distribution format, compressed these trees with LZW variant and executed using simple JIT compiler (basically, tree automata over program trees). The size of Slim Binaries was smaller than JAR files for comparable Java programs. I don't remember exact percentage reduction, it was about 20-40, I believe.
Not all intermediate representations are bytecode.
Applet 2.0 was Flash, followed by Applet 3.0 aka Silverlight, followed by Applet 4.0 aka ecmspriten/asm.js.
I am really happy that our current customer projects that I am involved with, are all native mobile and desktop applications.
(Hey, MS employees reading this - now VS Community is free-for-commercial-use, if you want to capture the 5<=revenue<=50 MM market, replicate the Delphi + VCL ecosystem for RAD apps with Azure as the backing technology. Lightswitch already let me target WPF and HTML5, with Xamarin you now have native mobile. You pushed for an "integrated" desktop + surface/tablet + cell-phone a few years too early, but Xamarin as the presentation layer and Azure as your data-store and you've got the feature set that most businesses need. You'd put me out of business, but absolutely take over that mid-market share.)
[0] Pedants, I'm one of you. No Coq was not used in this project ;) [1] http://blog.matthewskelton.net/2012/01/29/assert-based-error... Similar to this [2] http://janvanderhaegen.com/2015/01/14/its-2015-and-lightswit...
It will happen...
> And what advantage does WebAssembly have over Java applets ?
Microsoft supports asm.js.
Do people actually read docs any longer? https://github.com/WebAssembly/ has some, my blog covered the 1VM requirement. There won't be a new "sandbox". JS and wasm interoperate over shared objects.
No, not really. People read headlines and make pithy middlebrow comments. Though I also don't think that's a new phenomenon...
The same advantage as Javascript, I'd assume: easy access to the DOM and the concomitant natural integration into a webpage. Java applets were like a portal into a weird world that started with a security warning and all of the widgets looked wrong.
Not java.
I think they failed because they were closed off, and nobody could read the shitty code, so people wrote shitty code. If we have things open, it gives people an incentive to make it look/work nice. Sure, not everyone will, but it makes it easier to shame those that dont.
Plus minified and obsfucated JavaScript is already quite common. See closure and asm.js.
And I agree that modern minified, packed and obfuscated JavaScript is also more like a binary blob than source code. WebAssembly is just a logical conclusion of this.
People on HN seem to discount how absolutely amazing it is to have a VM that can almost seamlessly connect to a network and pull down awesome programs!