Why didn’t that happen? And why did it take so long before we got Groovy instead, if Sun wanted was imagining something like it way back in 1995?
Netscape did try to position server-side JavaScript as part of its Enterprise Server package though, but it was not JVM-based. But the environment was proprietary and not compelling enough for a myriad of reasons. It ran server JavaScript in CGI mode.
JavaScript took a long time to actually make it server-side. First with standalone interpreters (ie. Spidermonkey) and later with a full-fledged runtime and development environment (NodeJS).
Sure, but that's not an argument against JavaScript having potentially been a planned part of the JVM ecosystem (or, at least, a language playing a role in the JVM ecosystem, without itself being hosted on the JVM, instead maybe interacting with the JVM through some kind of IPC or FFI bridge.)
Remember, Sun used to be trying to squeeze the JVM into web browsers as well, in the form of Java applets. But we never saw any real ability to script against these applets. "Java applet 'engines' under JavaScript control", could have been the portable equivalent to "ActiveX components under JavaScript control."
You know how modern games involve 1. a self-contained game engine written in C++ or C#, plus 2. the game itself being mostly Lua scripting? If Sun had pushed harder, we could have seen something like that in 1995, with web browsers running JavaScript-scripted games calling into Java game engines; long before we got equivalent HTML5 APIs like Canvas.
Probably, if the world had gone down that path, we would have seen JavaScript gradually moving "into" the JVM; and the JVM gradually coming to take the position that the JavaScript engine takes in modern web browsers.
If the Java@Netscape story came about earlier than 1995 then maybe yes, the JVM could have made into the browser as THE scripting environment for an eventual JavaScript language, because Java the language was not suited for webpage designers to throw something together un a highly evente environment. The browser was the place to be and Java just didn't make it there (they fought hard though with their applet crap).
Then they were hoping that no one would buy them, not even themselves cared to own Java after their trick.
So now they push Kotlin, while researching Fuchsia, and keep a bunch of lawyers quite happy.
Interesting logic.
Thankfully we are going to have that settled in the near future, and then Android folks can party all night long with their Kotlin implementation and rename ART into KVM.
Not what I would call a tornado in the meaning pf destruction.
And about the license, well, it is disputed, right? I only read about it tangential, but the case seemed far from crystal clear to me.
No one needs Android Java slowing down the Java ecosystem by imposing additional burdens on Java library authors that also want to target Android.
Besides Google that is.
AFAICT the whole fight is over API's and not "don't pay what the license specifies" as they give you the ability to do a clean-room implementation without paying royalties.
It explicitly only allowed the use of JavaSE on desktop deployments, OpenJDK was yet to be made available.
I was the only PC guy on my gang, and that was just due to other factors not commodity.
Looking back at interviews and industry articles from that era, there is a common theme of Sun hating Microsoft. Lots of companies and people hated Microsoft but Sun seemed to make it their central ideology. As a result, they took their eye off of making great technology that customers could use to solve their problems. It's a pity because they were so far ahead of the game at that point that they could have developed into something wonderful instead of being absorbed by Oracle, with little trace left besides Java sleepwalking through the modern era.
I think basically everyone did back then. There was a pervasive understanding that if you were small enough, Microsoft would use underhanded business practices to crush you if you became a threat. If you made a compelling product, Microsoft would clone it and use their might to make it win.
It felt like taking a pottery class with a grizzly bear in the room. Really hard to be like, "I should just make the prettiest bowl I can" when you know at a moment's notice your head might be swiped off.
I had an internship at Sun in 2002. I distinctly remember a town-hall meeting hosted by Johnathan Schwartz (CTO at the time, later to be CEO) where an engineer asked something to the effect of "this all sounds great, but how does this actually make us money?" The engineer was told in no uncertain terms that he shouldn't ask such questions, that he should focus on engineering and that he should trust that other people would handle the money side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_langua...
These days, ironically, Telescript is a model for how distributed computation works in the 3rd world, and even in the first world. But Telescript basically would have made the lattice structures more hybridizable to project information and jobs within the context of already existent social networks and maybe provided a better nexus for useful work done vs power given up (it was made on a very astute observation about the energy, work, power, time, information, transmission nexus) before anyone named a "peer to peer network", a distributed consensus protocol, or introduced money into the picture.