Client-side Java [LWN.net]

Client-side Java

Posted May 16, 2008 22:41 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Client-side Java by zlynx
Parent article: Adobe releases Flash Player 10 beta

You are right, but that is not what Java was or is going to be. If Java had had a sane user interface (instead of Swing), some bytecode that was easy to optimize (instead of being stack-based), and good DOM libraries, it would be a great language, but it wouldn't be Java. (Incidentally, it would be close to Dalvik.)

It is a testimony to Sun's technical blunders that Javascript, once the ugly sister, is now the star language for the web. While being ugly, I might add.

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Client-side Java

Posted May 16, 2008 23:06 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

JS is actually a very pretty language with a few astoundingly ugly bad decisions in it (everything using globals is the biggest one, and the absence of an easy way to turn an object into a prototype for another: but the latter at least is easily fixed).

It's just that the available docs are mostly utterly awful, so most people don't know how to use it properly. Doug Crockford's video tutorials (especially the advanced ones) are excellent, though.