The end of an era, perhaps.
Applets are officially, completely removed from Java 26, coming in March of 2026. This brings to an official end the era of applets, which began in 1996. However, for years it has been possible to build modern, interactive web pages in Java without needing applets or plugins. TeaVM provides fast, performant, and lightweight tooling to transpile Java to run natively in the browser. And for a full front-end toolkit with templates, routing, components, and more, Flavour lets you build your modern single-page app using 100% Java.
↫ Andrew Oliver
As consumers, we don’t really encounter Java that much anymore unless we play Minecraft, but that doesn’t mean Java no longer has a place in this world. In fact, it still consistently ranks in the top three of most popular programming languages, so any tools to make using Java easier, both for programmers and users, are welcome.
LibreOffice still depends on Java for some operations. I had to install it on my system to open PDFs.
All of this seems really outdated. I get why someone would prefer something else to Javascript, but surely not Java… right?
We were extremely close to having Java as a second language in browsers… VBScript-style. Google was experimenting with it and version of Chrome with Java buit-in was nearing release… then Oracle decided it wants billions and everything was cancelled. We got Dart instead — and not in browser as native, but transpiled to JavaScript… it could have been an interesting alternate reality with Java as ubiquitous as JavaScript is today…
I assume the appeal is the same as with node.js on the server, it seems like a good idea to have the same language on both, hopefully leads to less code to maintain.
Lennie,
One language running everywhere is extremely appealing! Working with web pages specifically, it can be very annoying to maintain validation code in two spots and in two languages. That said, I think there’s a lot of controversy over what language it should be haha.
Personally I don’t think software needs to be distributed as source code. Rather than compiling everything down to javascript (such as what gets done in browsers), I think it would be better to use a specialized byte code like java and C# do. This works much better at mapping the intention from the source language than javascript does. “Does the upstream source code actually do this or did it arise as an artifact of translation into javascript?” This would help with optimization.
The typical argument against byte codes is that they are worse for FOSS purposes. However many intermediate byte codes capture essence well enough that they can be reconstituted into source code. Also, because many websites use js obfuscation, one looking at “javascript” may as well be reading binary code because it’s all gibberish and doesn’t satisfy FOSS constraints anyway.