At least there was a distinction between web of documents (WWW) and shipped apps with custom canvas. Rendering apps with web’s DOM is stupid. It makes websites a mess and relies on everyone using the same monoculture of browsers (like we now have Chromium, WebKit and Gecko, all nearly identical).
If browser does not support one feature (like CSS’s transform), the whole house of cards breaks. It’s like making ASCII art in notepad and then expecting everyone to use the same notepad app with the same font and style, to not break our art proportions.
We need to split web into websites and webapps, with webapps being browser dependent or full custom canvases and websites being immutable human-readable and editable format.
A major issue of flash and java was that they were foreign citizens - they didn’t interoperate with the rest of the web platform. With webapps you can inspect the application, change CSS styles or fonts, you can compose and layout them with other content. Not possible with flash/java.
With Java at least, that was by design and arguably a good thing. Instead of the bastardized “web apps” we have now that try to shoehorn an application into a web page, Java Web Start was designed to run a full-featured desktop application (complete with Swing UI that mimicked the native OS’s UI) with its own windows and such, just launched from a hyperlink instead of needing to be installed.
The only real problem with it was that “AJAX” style tech hadn’t been invented yet, so it had to download the whole thing before it could run instead of streaming parts of the app on the fly, and (I think) tended to interact with server-side code with RPC calls instead of the REST style APIs that folks prefer these days.
In other words, it failed mostly because it was ahead of its time, and Electron apps/PWAs are merely a poor reinvention of it.
AJAX is a JavaScript specific technology, Java applets had access to full network stack so it could do whatever it wanted in this regard. Java supports natively custom classloaders which could dynamically load classes from the network, but it’s not widely used and I don’t know if applets leveraged that.
Java applets had access to the full network stack, so you could use REST style calls or RPC styled network calls if you wanted. Java applets also had native RPC capability (with network being transparent), perhaps that’s what you mean. But all this is an implementation detail invisible to the user and not a reason why applets sucked.
I disagree. They sucked, because they were kinda something between desktop app and web app, largely combining disadvantages of both.
That’s why I said “AJAX-style” and not “AJAX.” Although it would’ve been technically possible to do whatever kind of communication they wanted, folks hadn’t really thought of trying to stream parts of the app itself after the rest of it was already running the way they do with javascript stuff. You had to wait for the entire
.jarto download before it would start, when what it really needed was the ability to download a little stub.jar, start running, and then stream classes on the fly as you accessed them.It kinds of seems like you have some confusion in the terminology. AJAX doesn’t mean streaming the app parts dynamically, it’s just client-server request controlled by JavaScript, originally used mostly to pull/post data, not code (the X means XML). Lazy loading application parts is a newer concept mainstreamed by SPAs / bundlers and can be done with AJAX/XHR or other means (injecting script tags or
await import).As mentioned above, a native support to do that was baked into Java since 1.0. It’s possible some applets even used that. Those that didn’t - their problem. But this practice wasn’t really common in JS apps of that time either (apps weren’t typically SPAs, but still).