Literally everything you said except the part about using the language you want has been true of Java for at least a decade.
Everything old is new again.
Everything old is new again.
The resources available for HTML/CSS cannot be compared with JavaFX, Swing or whatever the other original stack was. And the Applets sandboxing was obviously so horrible everyone killed it. WA is amazing here copying the existing and already hardened JavaScript model.
JS is a better compilation target (you don't have to use JS directly) than WASM for the vast majority of languages. WASM is great for when you have a bit of code you'd like to write in C and use as a library from JS (or a language compiled to JS).
Layout engines with customization capabilities?
Where is the hardware accelerated drawings that I can be fully sure it is hardware accelerated without doing tricks with z index and hoping for the best regarding mapping css drawings into textures?
Did you ever actually use a PowerBuilder (or similar RAD tool) application? The experience was horrible, slow, and basically a waste of titanic amounts of money.
I once saw half an accounting department quit after a switch to a RAD financials package.
There’s a reason all those 1990-2005 era vertical-market app companies got bought by PE firms and are just basically dead except for milking maintenance revenue. Building “data-model centric” apps with RAD tools optimizes for ease of the developer instead of the end user. Which is exactly backwards.
Parallel to that I have been doing Web projects since 2000 as well.
HTML 5 / CSS 3 has nothing that compares, that is why Flash took off and is coming back in the form of WebAssembly, now with everyone racing to support it with their favourite runtime + WebGL.
Either the developers are able to use the tooling at their disposal to deliver awesome products or not.
Skype was originally coded in Delphi, so yeah.
Anything written with Electron is pretty much bad.
I only put up with Slack and VSCode due to job requirements.
"Literally everything you said except the part about inflatable tires has been true of wooden wheels for at least 3000 years. Everything old is new again."
Sometimes, reinventing the wheel actually makes sense.
But I agree: HTML/CSS/JS is far easier (eg: threading) and generally results in a more polished experience.
None of them have anything to do with lack of skill using Swing.
> None of them have anything to do with lack of skill using Swing.
Can you name me 10 swing apps that look good? I can do the same for the web and MacOS. I'm not sure I'd be able to name 10 for windows, but I can name at least two.
Anyway, InteliJ, SwingUI Weather app, any app using Substance, Alloy, JGoodies or Synthetica theme libraries.
No need to be nasty. I chose 10 at random because it's a decent sample size without being too onerous for an online discussion. If I wanted to earn internet discussion points, I would have made it 10,000.
I'll take a look at those and get back to you. I'm very curious. Unlike some commenters (not a jab at any particular person or even a particular site, just a general observation of commenters online), I like it when I'm proven wrong about something. I'd rather know than live in ignorance.
Java is an open standard (I think, I didn't fact check this thuroughly) OpenJDK is the reference implementation of that standard. You can try to claim that in reality Oracle has a lot of control, but I'd come right back and say that Google basically controls the browser.
> The success of WASM is that my mom doesn't need to know how to install Java
If OSs had bundled a Java runtime she wouldn't need to install Java either.
I like Java but it's not like they didn't try Java applets. They really screwed the security model. I guess in that sense what the parent is asking for is actually not nearly as feasible as using the current web security model.
An arbitrary decision made by the manufacturer. If Apple decided they didn't want to support web assembly tomorrow, do you think that would kill the iPhone or WASM?
That's a good question, and it's certainly not one I'd want to bet on as Apple.
When they managed to kill off Flash and Java applets, they were getting rid of the two awkward technologies that almost everyone in web development disliked. There were useful replacements coming down the line with HTML5, ES6, and so on. It still took several years for the plugins to die out completely, during which time the browsing experience on Apple devices was noticeably inferior to everyone else's. Arguably it was only Chrome pulling support that finally put an end to the matter.
Today, Apple's reputation isn't what it used to be, with its normally loyal and enthusiastic fan base increasingly questioning the price of new devices, web developers increasingly questioning the lack of support for modern technologies in mobile Safari, native developers wary of Apple's policies around the App Store and how much of the money it's taking for its cut, and the walled garden ecosystem looking increasingly isolated in a world full of connected devices and data sharing. It's hard to see any of these trends changing in Apple's favour any time soon.
Right now, WASM is in its infancy, but if you stop and look at what is being attempted, it is arguably the most important new technology in web development. It's already reasonably well supported across almost every browser that matters, but not yet widely used. But give it a little time to establish it as a target for better languages than JS and to develop supporting tools and libraries, and it's not hard to imagine that in a decade's time we'll all be wondering what we were thinking using JS for so long.
Does wasm strategically impact the dominance of the App Store?
I recall there being an article about how despite the fact that iPhones are 10% of the market, they represented 50% of the profits for application developers.
GluonVM, RoboVM and CodenameOne are three AOT compilers for Java targeting iOS.
Also OpenJDK has reactivated the project to provide an AOT compiler for iOS via SubstractVM.