Java Reference
In-Depth Information
THE EVOLUTION OF CLIENT-SIDE JAVA: APPLETS, BROWSER WARS,
SWING, JAVAFX
While you can infer some of this from the per-JDK revision notes given in the rest of this ap-
pendix, it seems fitting to provide a unified narrative on the role of Java in the desktop.
Java began its public life as a vehicle for embedding flashy dynamic content in web pages via
Java applets. Applets got off to a flying start with their incorporation in the Netscape line of
browsers in 1995-96. Incidentally, part of the cross-licensing agreement between Sun and Nets-
cape was that Netscape could use the term “JavaScript” for what was then its “LiveScript” web
scripting language.
Applets, alas, never took over the world for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Microsoft
never allowed Java applets to become a full player in Internet Explorer, users' fear of security is-
sues (some of which surfaced from time to time), difficulties of installing and updating, and the
increasing capabilities of CSS and JavaScript, and later HTML5.
There were some large users—for example, the
Blackboard
product
used for student-instructor
communication in hundreds of colleges and universities. However, even these have had issues of
compatibility, sometimes requiring students to load a particular update like “JDK 1.6 Update 42”
in order to be supported on a given release of BlackBoard.
Along the way, the original AWT GUI package was supplanted by Swing, a newer and better
Graphical User Interface package. Around this time, the
Applet
class was supplemented with the
JApplet
class to allow
Applets
to be full users of Swing GUI classes.
Yet Java was never without competition on the desktop. Adobe Flash came along soon after Java,
and because it was single-sourced, came from the home of Illustrator and Photoshop, which the
web's graphic designers loved, and Flash prospered.
More recently, the browsers themselves have become competitors to both Java and Flash. The
HTML5 standard introduces a large number of technologies such as increased JavaScript, the
Canvas
object for graphics, access to some local devices, and much more. Many new projects
today are starting with HTML5. Though JavaScript is not as nice a programming environment as
Java, its familiarity to the large number of web developers in circulation has helped it dominate
large areas of desktop development.
One of Sun's responses was to target a new technogogy that is now called JavaFX to the desktop.
JavaFX can be used in browsers or in desktop applications. It does provide considerable benefits
to GUI and graphics developers. There is information on JavaFX in
Chapter 14
.
Also in the area of “client-side” technologies, Sun insisted from the beginning that mobile phone
developers use the Java Micro Edition (ME), based on a severely cut-down JVM and a totally dif-
ferent user interface package. Fortunately for Sun, BlackBerry (then called Research In Motion,
