Comment by csense
19 hours ago
Java Applets.
All the buzz in the 2020's about WASM giving websites the ability to run compiled code at native speed, letting pages network with your server via WebRTC?
Yeah, you could do that with Java Applets in 1999.
If Sun (and later Oracle) had been less bumbling and more visionary -- if they hadn't forced you to use canvas instead of integrating Java's display API with the DOM, if they had a properly designed sandbox that wasn't full of security vulnerabilities?
Java and the JVM could have co-evolved with JavaScript as a second language of the Web. Now Java applets are well and truly dead; the plugin's been removed from browsers, and even the plugin API's that allowed it to function have been deprecated and removed (I think; I'm not 100% sure about that).
Java never had a real display API. I guess there was swing, but that was very ugly and stuck out like a sore thumb on a web page (or desktop for that matter). JavaFX eventually became a thing, and was probably better, but for whatever reason never really caught on.
Java eventually got a DOM API but it was too late. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/ma...