JavaFX is now out: Are Applets and Java Desktop officially dead/dying? [closed]

Question

JavaFX is now out, and there are promises that Swing will improve along with JavaFX. Gone will be the days of ugly default UI, and at long last we can create engaging applications that are comparable to Flash, Air, and Silverlight in terms of quality.

1. Will this mean that Java Applets that hail from 1990's are dead and not worth going back to?

2. Same with Java Desktop: What will be compelling for us Java Developers to use it rather than JavaFX?

Answer 1

In my opinion Java Applets have been dead for years. I wrote some in the late 90s - a Tetris game during an internship to demonstrate on a 40MHz ARM Acorn Set Top Box for example. Of course I bet there are some casual game sites that have tonnes of them still, and thus it will remain supported, but active development will/has dropped off.

Java Web Start is a handy technology in my opinion. That will still work with JavaFX, it's just another library for that system.

JavaFX will give Java opportunities beyond technical tools (like SQL Developer), in-house business applications and server applications (where it excels). I think it's one of those libraries that is worth learning for any Java developer, if they can get the time. There's no arguing that user interface libraries for Java have been sorely lacking, or overly complex, for many a year.

However there's a lot of competition out there, and it is very new (which means the development tool support is very raw, compared to Flash and Silverlight). Also people don't like downloading massive runtime environments, although broadband makes it less painful than 5 years ago for many!

Answer 2

I think this discussion is somewhat misleading. I an no fan of applet technology either (and I have been underwhelmed by JavaFX). But the point that this thread is missing is that, unless I am mistaken, JavaFX is built on top of applet technology. They are not competing or mutually exclusive. See these articles here and here.

It could be that the confusion is somewhat intentional on Sun's part as they do not want JavaFX and applets to be mentioned in the same sentence, since Applets had so many problems.

Answer 3

Java Applets are not dead.

They had a bad history, for several reasons:

• Most platforms had bad browser plug-ins for the entire 90s, moving into the 2000s, and this gave Applets (and Java, to some extent) a reputation for slowness and large downloads.
• The actual Applet platform created a new VM for each applet, which further created sluggishness, especially in the startup of an Applet.
• many Applet developers weren't conscientious about minimizing the size of the jars they pushed down, even Further creating the impression of sluggishness

The improvements which bring JavaFX also bring improvements to the Applet (they are one and the same). VMs can be shared and caching is better than before. In addition, higher average user bandwidth can help even poorly designed applet deployments startup quickly. If you look along the axes of install base and platform power, the Applet is still pretty high up, if not the top, in my opinion.

JavaFX is cool, but it requires an additional runtime, and for many parts of it is just syntactic sugar on top of the Applet platform. Almost any problems Applets have today are shared by JavaFX for this reason