Java

Today I came across a dinosaur of the World Wide Web: a site that required Java to run. And not a personal site, either -- this company actually required people to pay money to use their service, a mistake you can be sure I will not be making.

Most people will remember Java fondly as bloatware, along with such horrors as RealPlayer and Quicktime. What it proposed was a true object-oriented language running in small 'applets' in your browser: like miniature programs! People imagined entire office suites.

Except... Java sucked. Java was slow to develop, and even slower to run, with the Java Virtual Machine growing to expand any available process time or memory that the users had. If you were using a Java applet, you would not be able to do anything else while that thing clunked away. And when you were done, the Java VM stayed in memory, keeping your computer choked.

Even more unfortunately for website coders, there was a better Java than Java, which already existed -- JavaScript. Javascript, the key to Web 2.0 buzzword 'AJAX', ran much faster and with much less trouble than waiting for the Java VM to load and run each time.

Java has been succeeded by Flash and Javascript for 99% of uses, with the remaining 1% has been replaced by the free Silverlight (for the 1% of users who can't afford Flash but have the ethics not to download it somewhere).

Nowadays, requiring Java to view a page is like requiring the <blink> tag, or VRML -- a sign of the web designers working there having learned nothing since the 90s.

Speaking of the 90s, writing this blog post has made me feel old. I think I'll go hunt for my VHS tapes of Eek! The Cat and Power Rangers and study my old Algebra 2 homework.