If Java could a) startup quickly, and b) download and install as well as Flash, well, the world would be a very different place.
The experience in both startup and JRE browser install is still quite painful. Going to Iris and having to click through 3 “Do you trusst this applet” dialogs, only to get a ClassDefNotFound error says it all.
Maybe Sun has finally listened and realized that you CAN just download a microkernel and have it pull in what it needs to enhance perceived speed:
One concern about JavaFX on the desktop is the deployment story. The JRE is a huge download for a user that doesn’t already have it installed and the current user experience for on-demand installation from the browser is not very good. Brewin fleshed out remarks made during the keynote to the effect that Java 6 Update 2 will introduce a new deployment model for the JRE where the initial download is very small and additional JRE components are lazily downloaded only as needed. He said that the concept is very similar to the Java Kernel project proposed for Java 7. Asked if a similar deployment scenario might be implemented for Java ME, he said it was certainly possible and that naturally this would be driven by the Java Community Process.
I hope so. Java has some serious advantages, and maybe there is still a hope?
May 13th, 2007 at 3:59 am
i doubt that with todays broadband connection download size of JRE is an issue. it usually takes 2-3 minutes to download the whole JRE (10 Megs). problem is incremental updates , ease of install and version mismatches. living together with other Java versions is another issue. i am not ure if java kernel will address those issues.
May 13th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Have to say I’m inclined to agree on the size & broadband issues – Silverlight of course needs the .Net framework which if anything is even larger than the JDK, although being preinstalled and supported by windows update gives it a huge advantage. In many ways Java deployment seems to shoot itself in the foot by ‘doing the right thing ‘with those security warnings, kind of like showing someone a video of a slaughterhouse and dodgy food preparation before asking if they’d like to eat this sausage. hmmm yummy.
I’m interested in the concept of ‘on demand’ do we have to wait for the app to satisfy all it’s dependencies on startup.. or suddenly have to wait five minutes because we’ve clicked a button we’ve not pushed before that needs a set of libraries. What’s covered by the kernel – purely those core runtime classes? additional apis and dlls like JAI & JMF (which JavaFX/F3 might need)? SDK tools (do scripting frameworks need a full SDK)? JDBC drivers? what about third party libs like Hibernate, Spring, Commons, SwingX? are we talking about an all-encompassing Java equivalent of .NET assemblies?
What happens when you try to use your apps offline or wander into a non-wireless area (or even one with very poor connection speeds)? does it freeze?
I’m also confused as to how these new RIA tools enhance Ajax apps? How do they fit into the browser model? Do they replace the browser rendering for the whole page? can you bookmark these pages? what happens with the browser buttons? do they still work? do they destroy any floating widgets?
Just some random thoughts.
May 13th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
There is still one thing left.
Tools for… designers. Adobe has this and it makes it quite delightful to build RIAs. Someone who know how to make good looking can produce these things directly into the real environment without going the way around a screen shot/animaton some developer then has to implement.
I’ll be happy man if they can do this :)
May 13th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Of course, it’s not just Adobe that has this. The (X)HTML/CSS/JS/Ajax world also enjoys this separation of concerns between desing/styling and behaviour.
May 14th, 2007 at 4:39 am
Tools and designers is another issue. Adobe are well known and much loved by designers for Photoshop and more recently Flash. Microsoft – probably not so much love but a cross they’re well accustomed to carrying. Sun is a bit of an unknown to them (for software) unless they tried dabbling with Applets and Netscape back in ‘97, or jsp themselves – in which case it’s often a bad memory.
Microsoft have been busy smoozing designers an pushing their expressions suite at web development conferences for the last couple of years. Sun has a lot of catching up to do if they’re serious. (Which I kind of doubt – isn’t this all about mindshare?). I’m not sure how they’d get much of a return developing, distributing and supporting these tools or hosting a live 24-hour jvm/class delivery system for the planet for that matter.
Being the open source underdog Sun might be hoping for the community to help fill the voids – but they need OpenJDK like yesterday and there seems to be a lot of bridges to the OSS crowd that need rebuilding. Java just isn’t seen as ‘hot’ anymore.
- Richard
May 14th, 2007 at 7:31 am
I believe something like: http://jroller.com/page/dk?entry=firefly_the_new_consumerjre_or
sounds much more promising then the Java Kernel project: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/enicholas/archive/2006/09/java_browser_ed.html