begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 09:25:51AM -0700: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > >begin quoting Christian Seberino as of Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 08:14:08PM > >>not sure why Java didn't take over the client side since it has such a > >>head start. > > > >It's from Sun, so Microsofties hated it and RMSofties hated it. > > > >And the sandbox was too effective for many webheads. "What do you mean > >I can't do _that_?" > > Bingo. > > IMO, this was the main one. Basically, you couldn't do anything useful > without explicitly authorizing the Java applet using a dialog box. You > couldn't touch the network; you couldn't touch the hard drive.
You could touch the network, but only back to the server the applet was loaded from. If you wanted to do fancy network things, you had to write something on the server, and then use the server's bandwidth. I think you can touch the disk -- but only so far as creating temporary files. So applets weren't much good at scraping content off your local disk, even if they could temporarily store stuff there. > From a security point of view, this is *good*. There is a reason I run > Firefox with AdBlock and NoScript. I don't want others to access my > computer without my knowledge. Take a look at the Flash preferences > sometime. Note the Microphone and Webcam icons? Do you really want > people to be able to access your microphone and webcam from Flash? At the moment, I do not even *have* a webcam. The only microphone I have is the one built into my laptop, so far as I know. :-/ > Of course, from a usability standpoint, not being able to do anything to > the computer *sucks*. You can't make YouTube in a Java applet without > nasty dialogs; you can in Flash. You can't make an iTunes in a Java > applet without nasty dialogs, you can in Flash. etc. I'm not sure I follow. I thought an applet *could* do sound... so you *could* play youtube or itunes in an applet, more or less. Or are you talking about *creating* youtube/itunes content? > Yet another example of the users being willing to turn over the security > of their machine for the tiniest of conveniences. > > However ... > > That wasn't the only reason. On the developer side, Flash does > animation. Java doesn't. Now, it does so by soaking up 100% of the CPU > on your machine, but it does animation. Java doesn't do animation *easy*. I've seen Java applets do animation. > The Flash authoring tools work very much like the video editing tools > that the visual arts people already know. There is no such equivalent > on the Java side. Good point. > If anyone wants to stop the continuing rise of Flash, one of the things > they would have to do is put together an open source project that > converts Macromedia Director projects directly into Java or Javascript. ...or MPEG or Quicktime or AVI etc. etc. > However, I don't see Adobe open-sourcing the specification to *that*. > > Oops. Is open-sourcing the specification really required? I would think publishing it without specific restrictions would suffice. Of course, they're putting in restrictions: http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/ Bullet #2 says: This license does not permit the usage of the specification to create software which supports SWF file playback. Looking at more of the specification at http://www.the-labs.com/MacromediaFlash/SWF-Spec/SWFfileformat.html (and getting over my wonder of having the magic string be "FWS") and it looks like someone _ought_ to be able to make a Java SWF player. Looking around brought me to https://jflash.dev.java.net/ So there's an effort underway for that. Presumably, once there's a Java player, writing a Java converter would be far less painful. > I just want to smack the web heads some days, though. We are just > starting to emerge from the Bad Old Days(tm) of single company dominance > on the web thanks to Firefox finally having a large enough share to > punch Microsoft. And they want to hand the keys to the kingdom back > over to another proprietary monopoly. > > They never learn. Worse, they mock those who do. -- About to start playing with Java 6. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
