Sorry Java, Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA) Is Now JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

Sorry Java, Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA) Is Now JavaScript

medium.com

15 pointsuscoderjs20 comments

I work with both but maintaining a large backend in JS with a large team has made me really appreciate Java and all it’s uncoolness

Amen. Despite being 25 years old the average JS stack is janky as hell. I regularly do all kinds of nonsense to get JS to work properly.

With Java the code, dependency management, and build tools just work. It's very pleasant to maintain.

Maintaining a JS project over more than a few years is a nightmare. Forced rewrites as libraries, build tools, linters, frameworks, and the language itself are constantly being reinvented. It's a huge pointless drain on resources.

And JS is awful cross-platform. You have to check and polyfill every feature if you want to work outside latest Chrome and Firefox. And transpile the code down to ES5.

With Java it runs exactly the same on every platform. We develop on Macs and run on Linux and it doesn't even matter.

I'm a back-end dev (various languages), and recently did some front-end work with React/TypeScript. It took minutes to 'compile' the 'scripting' language for me to run my changes in my development environment. That was as bad as the worst (mixed Java/Scala) project compile times I'd experienced using a JVM language. Some/most(?) of that might be asset handling, but 'modern' toolchains don't know their own cost or value.

Cannot read the article, since it is behind a wall.

In any case, sorry JavaScript, Java is still WORA, even on iOS and on the browser, it is only a matter to actually bother to learn where to get the tools from.

I don't know about mobile. Perhaps it's possible to do the following on mobile, I usually use my laptop.

Safari browser.

Clear history.

Develop / Empty caches.

Preferences / Security / uncheck Enable JavaScript

I get the full article.

I don't know if all that is truly necessary. I instead generally browse in Firefox with NoScript and with preference "Clear history when Firefox closes".

That also results in the full article.

Most of these sites rely on either JavaScript and/or cookies. Both of which are trivially bypassed with a few seconds of effort. That also includes sites like NY Times and Bloomberg, which are also linked on HN frequently.

Hard firewalls like WSJ and FT are more difficult to get around. But almost invariably someone will post a link to archive.(some-random-tld).

THIS.

Transpilers have extended Java's reach quite a bit, for me.

I don't think I've ever run a Java app on my iPad. Are there any examples of this?

Yes, these are the native code compilers for Java, able to target Apple mobile platforms.

https://www.codenameone.com/

https://gluonhq.com/products/mobile/

https://github.com/MobiVM/robovm

These look like ahead-of-time compilers using llvm with obj-c bindings. This is not Java running on iOS any more than than the lengths people have gone to make Rust run on iOS.

The JVM doesn’t exist on iOS.

Sure it does, compiled to native code ahead of time.

People have to start learning not to mix languages with implementations.

This is pedantry. Clearly you acknowledge these frameworks aren't write-once-run-anywhere in the same spirit as the conversation we're having. This same trick can be performed on a number of languages that don't claim to be WORA.

Those frameworks take JVM bytecode and convert it into machine language.

Looks WORA to me.

If that’s all it takes, I’m struggling to think of a language that isn’t WORA.

I feel like we are at an interesting place here with the WORA dream that everyone has been collectively chasing for a long time now.

It was obviously the main selling point for Java for a long time but it never really had a good story for the front end although I know Google for example had a number of frameworks that did exactly this (GWT / Closure).

Fundamentally the only thing that ran inside the browser was JavaScript which was a shame because that meant that for everyone who wanted to use a single language was forced to use it everywhere else which gave rise to things like Node, React Native and Electron etc.

The best solution we had between those two options was to make an attempt to transpile other languages like Dart and TypeScript into JavaScript in order to overcome its shortcomings.

While the reality of this is still a long way off I think the idea of WASM / WASI as a new platform that “all” languages could theoretically target is one of the more exciting prospects coming down the pipeline in terms of the WORA dream. I think it’s fair to say that it also has the potential to move the needle in a significant way for the “browser as an app platform” story.

The question then becomes where does that leave us with JavaScript when you take away it’s main advantage.

On the backend as well there are a lot of interesting things happening. Containers have gone from requiring a lot of complexity (kubernetes) to dead simple (knative / Google cloud run) where you just ship a container and everything works out of the box. Combined with things like gRPC on the backend and also coming to the browser I feel like the future of application development is looking genuinely exciting.

Nearly everybody I've seen seems to completely dismiss the amount of closed-sourced Java that is floating around in enterprises. There is code outside of GitHub, you know.

I'd rather say Electron is the new Java.

Write once, debug everywhere, consume all the a RAM, have poor integration in all desktop, full of glitches in Linux.

and most developers don't even release a linux version.

It's also difficult to run electron apps under wine so ultimately it results in less Linux apps.

The desire for "Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA)" probably came from Smalltalk (Kaye, Goldberg, Ingalls) and was adopted by Java. Both Java and Javascript were influenced by the Smalltalk language and system.

Wikipedia attributes the phrase to SUN Microsystems and Java but, with weasel words admits that the same idea was baked into UCSD Pascal.

No need to be sorry. I don't understand this rivalry. The language is just a tool, just pick the best one for the specific problem. I'd be wary of someone dismissing Java in the way the OP does in the article. It's true Java is coming rather slowly to webasm, but hey, once it gets there it's going to be applets 2000's all over again!

It is already there,

http://teavm.org/

https://www.leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpj.html

Have fun running the Swing and JavaFX demos.

As mentioned on my other comment, it is a matter to care to learn about the tools.

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