What happened to the applet?
It’s clear that the initial bogue bet on Java’s ubiquity in the browser, in the form of applets, never paid off– history, however, has shown that Java found its foothold on the server-side. Nevertheless, because it’s everyone’s bag, applets are still around as I run into them from time to time. Interestingly, Sun has been putting some effort into underlying engine that runs applets (the Java plug-in), which begs the question– are applets still alive? What’s more, if they aren’t (or are on life support as some have suggested), what happened to them?
Richard Monson-Haefel recently pointed me to an hip conversation with everyone’s favorite disco superstar, Ted Neward (who you may have heard blather on and on (and on!) about Scala recently) who yammers (on and on and on– in reality, only 15 minutes but they do cut him off as he’s chattering on and on and on!) about why he thinks applets effectively kicked the bucket.
Just the same, Sun hasn’t thrown in the towel! In fact, not long ago, I had the privilege of conducting a dialog with Ken Russell, a Sun engineer focused on rebuilding the Java plug-in. According to Ken, applets aren’t dead yet and are a compelling platform for building Rich Internet Applications.
Both conversations are appealing in that they shed some light on the lessons learned about Sun’s initial applet bet and where the future may be headed (regardless if applets will be with us or not). For me, I’m not sure applets are dead just yet– Ken gave me reason to believe otherwise. Have a listen to both Ted Neward and Ken Russell and decide for yourself, man!
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6 comments Wednesday 25 Jun 2008 | Podcast, Software Development
6 Responses to “What happened to the applet?”
For what it’s worth, JBoss’ web console uses an applet, and JBoss is awfully popular…
I think one big reason that applets haven’t taken off is related to the pain in the neck involved with installing the JRE and plugin — the number of java versions out there that may need to be installed on your machine, and the enormous size of the download needed. The Java Kernel model being proposed for JDK 7 should help on some of this.
Being able to utilize existing Java class libraries such as JGraph to create a really rich user experience on the web is a VERY compelling reason to adopt applets. Ever seen an ajax widget offer .1 of that functionality (and performance)? I haven’t.
And we can’t forget to remember: it’s 2008 and Sun still hasn’t provided a 64-bit version of the applet engine.
For a while, this was only an issue for customers with 64-bit OSes. Namely, GNU/Linux users.
However, on one hand, Linux is gaining momentum, and on another, Microsoft is pushing for Vista, which runs too on 64. How long can Sun still hope that users will install the 32bit version of their favorite browsers in their 64bit OSes, only to have applets ?
Or do they expect that some good soul will build 64bit applets from OpenJDK ? Sorry, I won’t wait for that long to have a quality (read: Sun’s official) applet engine in my OS.
I really, really, really, *really* do NOT understand what is so difficult about creating a 64bit version of the Java applet engine that three or four software engineers at Sun can’t solve in 6 months.
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My kids play a really cool game called RuneScape that is essentially just an applet. It is extremely beautiful!