Two years from now I think people will realize how superior OGL is for 2d graphics than anything else available. If you compare what can be done in Processing versus Flash for example, you’ll see the difference.

While I think it’s ridiculous to compare implementations instead of architectures, I think it’s important to note that VS (2005 is my reference) is not as powerful as Eclipse. I also think the latest Eclipse made some (innovative) performance mistakes in their refactoring and template UIs, using linked text areas.

I guess what I’m trying to say nothing else comes close to what’s been happening on the Java platform, and I hope it continues.

Does anyone know if this problem is fixed? It is a real showstopper in using Java applets with Ajax.

Moreover, in my experience, VS does alot less work than IDEA or Eclipse when it comes to maintaining a synchronized view of your entire project, as the latter build and whole massive indexes of the project, every class, every method, every identifier, every type, to provide fast navigation, usage-finding, search, on-the-fly code analysis, and refactoring. You need something like Resharper in VS to even begin to approach what Eclipse and IDEA offer. IDEA for example is running like 500 code inspections every time you type something, and Eclipse is recompiling your code constantly. Maybe if someone implements an IDE as simple as VS in Java (jEdit?) we can have a more accurate comparison.

As to why I compared Java to Javascript, another user Joeri brought it up. The point is, Java execution at lighting fast, the idea that it’s slow is a myth, benchmarks bare this out. Java gives a bad end user impression because of a) slow install time b) slow startup time and c) a UI library that suffers from “overdesign”. The Java6 update is trying to solve a) and b). c) isn’t going to be solved anytime soon.

And how are you measuring this? Any non-trivial Javascript RIA app running in a web browser like IE or Firefox will easily consume over 200mb of memory, and once it starts leaking memory (as a large chunk of AJAX apps do), that climbs easily to 500mb.

If memory usage is to be the measuring stick, JS for GUI in the Browser fails miserably. To get a very simple application up and running in AJAX, my Firefox will typically consume more memory than an instance of IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse with a 1,000 + file project loaded.

I routinely develop using Java IDEs on large code bases and when I look at system memory consumption, Firefox is always larger. JS doesn’t even win on codesize. I routinely see packed minified RIA JS apps sending down larger amounts of code than equivalent Java GUIs, think a Java version of ExtJS’s demos would be larger?

RIA AJAX browser apps win IMHO on startup time and ease of development, not on runtime speed or memory efficiency. Flash is memory efficient only insofar as you stay away from DHTML. (I’m not discussing language syntax, I am not fan of Java’s language syntax, I’m talking about maturity and efficiency of execution)

Let’s flip this around and look at an area where Flash lacks native acceleration, so it competes with Java on equal footing: 3D rendering. Papervision 3D has to do alot of work just to produce an inaccurate rasterization of an small amount of texture polygons. Likewise, Java, without Java3D/JavaGL, performing the same workload as Papervision 3D, doing rasterization in pure Java with just image filled polygons, would stomp all over it by a factor of 50x in performance.

Flash has an awesomely tuned (but limited, just look at Porter-Duff modes, font-rendering, bitmapdata vs bufferedimage, etc) vector engine that allows scripting from Javascript, but performance is mostly derived from the native. Java is handicapped by trying to be too cross-platform with as little native code as possible. Couple the Flash vector engine to Java and it would scream too.

Brad Neuberg

Do you think that Flash or Javascript, or Python, or TCL executes faster than Java? They are orders of magnitude slower, but the UI code is native and tuned to respond fast, thus the impression of speed.

They’ve done alot of work in 1.6 to streamline the UI problems, for example, how Java2D calls get pipelined to DirectX or OpenGL. Java’s unfortunate bane has always been it’s little understood performance issues, wherein non-GUI code has smoking performance, but enduser facing code is often perceived as laggy.

One thing makes me laugh though: “Modern Java Runtime Environments (JREs) are stable, reliable, and fast.” Java is pretty slow running on Windows, I’d like to read their requirement metrics on performance ;-).

Maybe they’ll be able to get back some lost ground over a long time, but at this point, they’re starting at the same position and Silverlight, when compared to Flash. Which is a shame, because Java2D blows away Flash’s drawing API, and JavaGL would rock in the browser.

That said, I’m still happy they’re doing this, but here’s my concern:
1) No Safari/Webkit support
2) What of OSX? Sun is still delegating responsibility for a JRE to Apple, and given the sloth-like speed of Apple JRE releases, it’s likely Java8 will be out before Apple can release a JRE u10 compatible release. Now, Apple doesn’t have a need of the Java Kernel, since they will just pre-load it via an update on everyone’s machine, but there is still the need of a OSX Safari plugin that is feature-for-feature compatible with the new Plugin API.