Voleris Rich Internet Application Blog

Believe it or not, the title of this post, “The Return of Java for RIAs”, is becoming less bold a prediction as each day passes. This is a Good Thing.

Let me begin by explaining why the prediction was bold. My first exposure to Java was applets. The idea seemed brilliant to me at the time — a full powered rich application embedded in a web page (I don’t recall “rich” being a buzzword then). Surely this would revolutionize web-based applications.

[Fast forward a decade or so]

What the heck happened? What happened was, frankly, Java applets suck. I think there are two primary reasons for this:

1. To this day, loading the JRE is too slow. This is not such a big problem for a large application. (Check out ThinkFree for a great example of the power of Java in the browser.) However, the web needs the ability to have small, nimble applets, and we’re just not there yet. Note that the JRE download size is NOT the issue.
2. There were so many bad applets. By “bad” I mean ugly, misused, poor design, etc. Granted, you could say the same thing about the web in general. 90% of web sites are still bad to this day. However, nothing is worse than waiting in suspense (see #1) to be let down, or worse yet appalled.

Now I have to figure out how to convince you that Java applets are the wave of the RIA future. Oh my.

The idea of Java in the browser is still a good one. In fact, it’s downright seductive. We just need to work on some of the issues that have plagued applets.

Fortunately, there’s been more talk of Sun making some kind of browser edition of Java that will enable quick loading. This would be great. On a side note, I think it would also be nice if browsers would give users the option of automatically loading Java in the background once the browser is fully initialized.

Also, there seems to be a new wave of Java applets and desktop applications being born. It almost seems as if a second generation of Java developers has come of age and is intent on building better rich applications. This is really great because the technologies are improving, and we need to see good application design to put the technology to use in a good way.

Last but not least, Java is truly an open platform now. The Java language plus all the accompanying facilities are completely controlled by the Java Community Process. The only remaining issue was that Sun’s Java virtual machine implementations were closed source. As of a couple of months ago, this issue has been solved by the open sourcing of the VM’s by Sun and the GPL license Sun chose for Java. This is huge, and in my opinion, solidifies Java as an open standard, much like HTML and JavaScript (ECMAScript) are. The language is Free, the platform is Free, and many of the great tools are Free (as in beer and liberty).

Java may be poised to give Adobe’s Flash/Flex (closed, proprietary, non-Free) a run for its money.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 9:12 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.