Future of Java or Future of the Web ? - 1
As we all know, Java applets were just like the lightning, came in a flash, filled us with amazement and disappeared in the same speed it came in. Just like Steve Jobs, people were thinking about Java as “the heavyweight ball and chain”. Java, on the client side was heavy, with the need to download the entire applet before running it. And you will be needing a JRE and a browser plugin to run that applet both of which are not lightweight. That was thought of as the end of Java UI in the internet when the JEE framework came up. And the applets were soon forgotten. Still lot of web applications across the internet use applets but they are a countable number. The death of applets also saw the death of feature Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).
Then came AJAX two years back. (AJAX, the name, saw its second birthday last week). Same hype as applets. Everybody were talking AJAX. AJAX is now seen as the future of the web. People have already drawn graphs showing AJAX as the only technology that is going to dominate the web for the next 5 years. But then digging deep, what is AJAX? Just javascript with those bells and whistles. And theoretically, everybody knows that AJAX was there for the Internet Explorer long before it came for other browsers in the form of ActiveXObject. Till now, AJAX browser requests is done differently for different browsers, specifically Internet Explorer and others. Though lots of frameworks like the Prototype, DOJO and scriptaculous are already in the market which hides the cross-scripting mechanism, the weaknesses and the limitations of Javascript could not be hidden for long. If you are a regular user of any of the AJAX based web-applications you would easily realise that the page is not foolproof. Only thing is that you are starting to live with it. Initially, I used to have problems using Gmail with Internet Explorer. I can never click on any of those “links” in Gmail after I download a mail-attached file. Only a browser refresh would help and you know pretty well that a browser refresh in Gmail would take me to the first page in my inbox and not the page i was working on. And AJAX based web applications can never do all the things than an Applet can do.
But, as Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in Java, rightly quotes, “Java has been around for 10 years and applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web”. Applets is not the future. I had to meekly accept that Java, even after 10 years, didnt have anything that could revolutionize the UI. IBM came up with SWT for Desktop applications. Eclipse rocks with SWT. True. But that is definitely not cross-platform. Netbeans is based on Swing. Cross-platform but heavy as hell.
So, what holds for the future. No Applets. No AJAX. What else?
