Comments on: Ken Russell on the new Java Plugin

By: stevpan

stevpan — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 03:30:05 +0000

The best news I heard! I had a java klok applet that always freeze the browser 10 seconds. It really annoys me. Hope this plugin will be released as soon as possible. But why sun always does things so slowly?

By: Alex Koifman

Alex Koifman — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:27:22 +0000

1. What about an auto-install of the Java plugin for Linux Firefox? Now, you have to install the JRE and manually create a link from the Firefox plugin directory to the JRE plugin. This is so bad – you cannot go commercial with this.

2. What about a 64-bit plugin for a 64-bit Linux architecture? Today, we have to install 32-bit Firefox and 32-bit plugin on a 64-bit Linux. This is non-intuitive. Also, another no-no for commercial clients.

By: Kevin Chiu

Kevin Chiu — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:32:06 +0000

They should call it Java, new and improved with “Instant On.”

By: web design firenze

web design firenze — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:11:10 +0000

@Karl

The only fact that you are comparing javascript to java, makes me understand what a bad name java made of itself during the “applet days”.

Java can do incredible things, that javascript or flash, or both can’t even imagine to do.

I really hope that this new plugin and the new lightweight VM will change things.

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:47:43 +0000

Check this out. Will the new java plugin care for this: http://www.jroller.com/dk/entry/applets_for_the_masses

By: Andrew Assarattanakul

Andrew Assarattanakul — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 20:44:42 +0000

Looks like Sun has something for them when they release this. But we’ll see how easy or hard it will be to do the same things people can already do in Flash, Silverlight and AJAX.

By: Karl M

Karl M — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:17:49 +0000

@martin – yes, this supposedly solves the startup issue, though the other poster is correct with regards to if you have a lot of code to pull down, though imagine pulling down an word processor once, then caching it.
AJAX has been evolving to offer the functionality of Java while Java has had performance issues. They both have a goal of offering RIA so what is easier: building up to an complete RIA with AJAX or refining Java down to provide RIA? IMO, if the Java team at sun can pull this off they will have leapfrogged the entire AJAX paradigm.

By: Reggie Drake

Reggie Drake — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 11:04:32 +0000

Since it is supposed to start in a separate process, it is unlikely to freeze the browser. Since it is supposed to have sub-second startup times (will undoubtedly be more when it needs to download and load a big jar file), it shouldn’t take ages to start up anymore.

Who knows, maybe we’ll be doing client-side programs in Clojure (http://clojure.sourceforge.net) next year.

By: Martin

Martin — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:36:59 +0000

Everyone knows this situation: browser stops responding and repainting and you cannot do anything. And there’s a message “starting java…” in the status bar. That’s the reason why everyone hates java. Why flash starts immediately?

Is the new plugin solving this or not?

By: dejagothic

dejagothic — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:03:09 +0000

nil

By: star

star — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 02:34:16 +0000

Round up!

3.8 out of 5 stars should appear as 4 stars.

By: Jos Hirth

Jos Hirth — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 22:30:49 +0000

Very interesting interview, but the massive background noise killed all the fun.

A separate process should indeed speed up things quite a bit – especially on multi core machines. Just imagine you have several tabs open and all those flash ads cause the browser process to use quite a lot of power. If it’s running in another process it can just run over at another core.

By: Magnus

Magnus — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:05:04 +0000

Thanks for posting this, but all that background noise seriously gave me a headache

Karl M,
The “Consumer JRE” is actually Java 6 update 5 which will be released early next yeat and the Early Access version of Java SE 6 Update N already has many of the new features

By: Karl M

Karl M — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:19:22 +0000

ugh…. there’s a post-limit?!?!

By: Karl M

Karl M — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:18:36 +0000

The new 1.7 release will have the new lightweight VM people keep talking about(Consumer JRE). Think of it like this: having all the correctness and utility the java language provides with sub-second startup time – in a browser.

Silverlight and Flash are client-side environments. java is both a language and a platform. C# is a language, .NET is a platform, Ruby is a language, etc… IMO, this simple fact – that java is both – has allowed it to survive and become the next COBOL, only with pretty transparency. =)

I will be able to write a Java applet that calls an EJB(from a web browser) that talks to a financial services application on the mainframe in

By: Dustin Diaz

Dustin Diaz — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:04:54 +0000

I only have nightmares about Java embedded into the browser. To this day I still set my browser preferences to disable Java. It’s very likely I’ll miss a revolution without even knowing it.

By: Dion Almaer

Dion Almaer — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:45:35 +0000

We through it up as quicktime while we worked on getting it into Flash.

We replaced the quicktime version with a Vimeo flash version which keeps the high quality and allows for the length (we couldn’t use YouTube because of the length).

By: Jon Hartmann

Jon Hartmann — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:56:34 +0000

I’d rather have then break the site a little then not post info about cool stuff like this.

By: ben

ben — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:47:53 +0000

Do you never learn? How many times has everyone complained about embedded quicktime? seriously – stop.

By: Philip Plante

Philip Plante — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:31:25 +0000

I hope this is actually an improvement in Applet load times. AS3 is now out and supported in many browsers, and with it came huge improvements in performance that put AS3 ahead of Java applets in my mind. However if Java developers have come up with a method to speed the start time up then it can put it back on par with AS3.