[hn_throwaway_99]

I'm not saying Java code isn't very portable, and there are some notable exceptions (the IntelliJ/JetBrains products always are first to come to mind) of successful cross platform Java client apps.

But much of the original late 90s hype about Java was its cross platform nature, especially in the browser, but Java applets and other in-browser Java technologies were never popular (consider GMail and other GWT apps were written in Java but compiled down to Javascript).

Java owes 90%+ of its ubiquity and longevity to its success on the server.

[thu2111]

They were pretty popular actually. The problem was that browser makers started trying to kill applets off very early. Netscape supported them, but Microsoft / Sun had a huge falling out and they ended up pushing ActiveX very hard as a replacement. The dominance of IE assured that ActiveX replaced Java applets for a while, and then MS fell out of love with ActiveX too, so HTML+JS was all that was left.

Applets were very much a victim of various power struggles within the browser industry, combined with Sun's general lack of competence on the desktop - for instance, their online upgrade engines have always sucked. Though in fairness, nobody got that right until Chrome.

[spullara]

Ironically if Java developers had used the built in DOM APIs instead of the Applet canvas crap, we probably would have had great SPAs a lot earlier.

[chii]

> DOM APIs instead of the Applet canvas crap

i wonder if it was because at the time, the different DOM api in each browser was so immature, that to unify it into a single api is too big a task. The applet+blackbox region for rendering is the easiest MVP. Of course, with hindsight, that turned out to be a piece of crap.

[zaphirplane]

Isn’t that jquery? Seems surmounted by a few very talented people

[therealx]

True, and if gui libraries stuck with common widgets that were cross platform, we would already have a long term native cross platform GUI toolkit.

[therealx]

The successful cross platform apps usually are in a space where having a non-native GUI is accepted.