Random thoughts and best wishes to Sun

More than 10 years ago, the boom of the Internet rescued a research project named "the Oak programming language" which in turn rescued the company behind it. At that very era when most websites were static, the Oak language served as the backbone of the first generation of highly dynamic internet and became a great success. The Oak language then seized a lot of backend server market, and became the standard of "Enterprise Computing".

The success of Oak even convinced the guys at Netscape to give LiveScript, their embedded language for Navigator, a new name. Thus JavaScript was born, and overlooked for many years.

All right, above is about the first days of Sun's Oak project, now called JAVA because of legal issues.

However, the so called applets, i.e. browser plugin based applications had serious flaws on performance and deployment, and soon lost the ground to Flash. (According to ESR, the virtual machine wars between Microsoft and Sun also "contributed" to the fall of applets.)

But the hot term RIA, as in Rich Internet Applications, coined by Adobe, the owner of Flash after the acquisition of Macromedia, has no much fundamental difference from the ideas behind applets, which is from the stone age.

So it seems Sun does have a point that they built the first generation RIA platform, and then (sort of) ruined it.

In a world with too many new "concepts", people are buzy reinventing things.

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Now there is an Ajax vs RIA war, which is said to redefine our view of the internet.

Just as Sun promised us in the mid-90's.

Ajax is exactly a technology from the past, combined with JavaScript (the long-term overlooked), XMLHttpRequest (originally a Microsoft "cheat" for IE to support Outlook), and XML (the shiny-and-all-mighty markup language that can, and should be used to do, everything). This movement also turns the browsers into something they never intended to be, violating the "Do one thing and do it right" principle. The whole (X)HTML + CSS + JavaScript thing, along with subtle differences between browsers, creates a mess.

Yet it is well received, and the web is now walking towards an application platform, accompanyed by a new standard called HTML5, or "Web Applications 1.0", more percisely.

JavaScript finally had its own Renaissance, in a way no one could have imagined.

It may, or may not, also be a case for Java Applets.

Sun has finally made up its mind to return to the battlefield, and now the satuation is somewhat like the one in 1995, that Sun is having financial problems and needs something to boost itself. Will this time JavaFX rescue Sun again and start the Renaissance of client-side java?

Let's wait and see.

And my two cents is that, Sun should really pay more attention to the open source community as we do not have a truly open RIA platform yet and JavaFX would help a lot if we are to reach the critical mass, so I believe many are willing to help. Without the extensive experience of Adobe and vast amount of resources of Microsoft, it is the power of the community that Sun could, should, and maybe has to trust.

Then, is it true that Sun is still NOT willing to release a Linux version of JavaFX on Dec 4, even though the nighty builds have been available for a long time?

You need confidence and crystal-clear vision, Sun.

So that we can have crystal-clear confidence in you.

Best wishes.