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Comment by relyks | Hacker News Reader

Why is Java not considered as a cross-platform solution?

Java on the desktop died because it didn't provide a native enough look and feel and it performed too slowly. Now we just don't care about look and feel and pretend every user has 16GB of RAM like the developer machines do.

JavaFX is actually pretty good and the performance is much better than Electron.

> and pretend every user has 16GB of RAM

I currently have two separate JetBrains IDEs each with multiple projects opened on my 8 GB MacBook Air. Doesn't seem to be a problem.

I was talking more historically. Java was slow and fell out of favor at a time when the average desktop had 16MB of RAM (and many had less). It never recovered from that perception and was pretty much confined to server side tasks.

Now developers are working on electron apps and the average machine with 2GB makes an electron app today feel like a java one from 20 years ago.

All the IntelliJ environments are Java based and seem reasonably well-liked. So it seems alive and well, in its niche.

Java on the desktop died because most developers were too lazy to learn how to use Swing properly, while writing everything on the UI thread.

I don't buy that excuse, it never affected winforms or vb take-up that often had the same issue.

First of all you are talking about OS SDKs, first class platform languages designed by the OS owners.

Second anyone that bothered reading Filthy Rich Clients book should be capable of doing a WinForms like experience.

What I conceed is that Swing has the wrong defaults and requires more UI design skills from devs than Forms does.

Example of a properly done Swing app? Not trolling, genuinely curious to see what that looks like (code + result). I also assumed it was because they perform terribly and look non-native.

The IntelliJ stuff is Swing IIRC, but not open source.

jEdit, IIRC, was often mentioned as a properly written java GUI app, I think it's Swing, but I might be wrong.

EDIT: IDEA code is apparently open https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

Bitwig Studio, https://www.bitwig.com/en/bitwig-studio.html

Booksmart. http://www.blurb.com/booksmart

Ultramixer, http://www.ultramixer.com

jAlbum, https://jalbum.net/en/

VRL Studio, http://vrl-studio.mihosoft.eu/

Centigrade UI Components, http://www.centigrade.de/en/products/bizlaf-stock-look-and-f...

Synthetica UI Components, http://www.javasoft.de/synthetica/

JGoodies UI Components, http://www.jgoodies.com/products/smart-client/

SQL Developer from Oracle is also quite ok.

The sample applications developed on the "Filthy Rich Clients" book, http://filthyrichclients.org/

You can watch the related JavaONE 2008 session at

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/j1sessn-jsp-155597.ht...

Oh and MATLAB is also a Swing application.

Has the latter problem been solved? Jvm startup times still seem like an issue to me.

The JVM isn't actually slow to start [1] (albeit it does start about 3x-4x slower than python, ruby, or node) [2]. Most of the slow startup in a JVM-based application is in classloading [3] or waiting for your chosen framework to initialize [4] before the control is handed to your custom code.

[1] https://purelyfunctional.tv/article/the-legend-of-long-jvm-s... [2] https://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Improving+Clojure+Sta... [3] http://blog.ndk.io/clojure-bootstrapping.html [4] https://jkutner.github.io/2015/12/01/java-boot-time.html

> Java on the desktop died because it didn't provide a native enough look and feel and it performed too slowly

Not to mention end users needed to download and update hefty runtimes in order to run the software.

My guess is they didn't have much in-house expertise for Java and just neglected to mention it in the write-up.

Also, Java isn't cool.

And JS is?

Sadly, it appears so.

:-(

This is so backwards.

For clients, JS runtimes offer a more polished experience on average than Java. That's not because of anything really intrinsic to the languages or platforms - it's just worked out that there is a lot of Java server code and a lot of JS client code, and consequently more catering to either of those extremes.

> JS runtimes offer a more polished experience on average than Java

[Citation needed]

They're both non-ideal solutions, but there is one caveat:

java tends to be the language of choice for companies like JetBrains, that want to deliver an awesome experience on all platforms, and go as far as shipping a custom JVM to make that happen.

javascript (read Electron) tends to be the language of choice for web developers who want to see their fancy icon in the Dock/Menubar.

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