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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Unlike other REST clients like Postman and Insomnia, Everest is written in Java. Thus, it is significantly lighter on resources and more responsive than the Electron-based options.

A technology finally came up to make a Java desktop app look better in comparison...

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I always laughing when I'm thinking about it. A lot of tech people complained about Java being resource-hungry. Just to get another more resource-hungry technology. It just means that those complaints are not very serious. If people like software, they'll use it.

>It just means that those complaints are not very serious. If people like software, they'll use it.

Or rather, if people have no other options, they'll use whatever they are given.

Besides, it's not very serious if user adoption is the criterion -- as opposed to the possibility of a better computing environment.

> Or rather, if people have no other options, they'll use whatever they are given.

I have a simple example: Discord. It's a popular voice conference application used by many gamers. I played WoW for many years and I saw voice software gamers used. It was Ventrillo, it was Raid Call, it was Team Speak. They are native programs. Discord is very recent player but it completely disrupted this ecosystem. In few years every WoW community switched to Discord. Nobody cares that it's JavaScript with React (AFAIK). But everybody likes slick interface and features.

It helps that Discord is amazingly fast and responsive and doesn’t “feel” heavy.

Those people people were complaining about it 10 years ago. In those times I remember that you could recognize a Java desktop application because you could count the seconds that it would take for a menu to open after a click. While the current batch of Electron apps use lot of memory/cpu/battery, they usually fare _much_ better in interactivity, which is what often drives away a user.

> count the seconds that it would take for a menu to open after a click

if that's really the case, then it was the application writer's fault, as java can be made just as responsive, if not more so, than electron. The GC can be tuned far better tha javascript!

I agree that a Java desktop application can be responsive, in fact I use a couple of them from time to time that behave quite well. Back in the day though my experience was that most of the Java software had terrible performance. In that case, I think it's correct to blame the platform for making hard to have a smooth experience "by default". (In the same way, for example, that we can blame C for not making it easy to write safe program, even if a programmer should be able to write them properly)

> The GC can be tuned far better tha javascript!

On this I agree completely! (altough my experience with that is mostly on the server side)

The people that cared about their users already had the option to AOT compile those Java applications, or actually write them properly.

Many Java applications got bad reputation because no one bothered to learn how to use Swing properly and were doing everything on the UI thread.

Java isn't so much of a hog anymore. My stupid little Kotlin JavaFX apps with a dozen Maven deps sip memory like too-hot coffee

JavaFX was released nine years ago.

V edit: yep my reading comprehension is not on point today

They're talking about electron.

I can't believe JavaFX is still alive, it's been years since Silverlight and Flash died.

JavaFX is not a browser plugin tech.

Weren't Silverlight and Flash closer to Java Applets? Those are as far as I can tell also dead.

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