Java Web Start always seemed like a lazy approach to bring legacy desktop apps into the web. Something you would associate with enterprise software, where end user experience apparently does not matter. I remember lengthy downloads of jar files, where eventually, some desktop window using very 1990s-looking Swing widgets would pop out. Not to mention that you needed to download a JRE (don’t remember if this was automatic on first launch).
Even in the heydays of Java, desktop applications were never all that great. I remember how painfully slow Eclipse ran. And when I tried the WebStorm IDE a few years back, all the same problems still existed re memory management and some pronounced latency pressing a key and having the character appear on screen. WebStorm was also infamous for its code indexing runs, which pretty much froze my computer for a number of minutes. Not sure if that’s a Java problem though.
People criticise Electron, but honestly: applications like Slack, Spotify and VS Code run much better than the Java-based desktop apps that I got to use.
Not really, Java Web Start essentially provided a way to download a fully-capable Java application running on normal JVM, from a click on website.
It's been used in place of applets a lot, but mostly because you could provide a complex application that opened in a new window with a click (assuming you dealt with the CA shenanigans).
It couldn't interact with DOM unless it accessed a browser over something like COM.
I worked on an app that was using Java Web Start still, as of January 2023. It was a problem, because JWS was not included in the parts of Java that were open-sourced, and was not available as part of recent OpenJDK versions of Java. Some open source JWS implementations exist, when I left that job though, the situation had still not been resolved in terms of finding a JWS replacement. It was imperative that we get off Oracle Java because of their expensive upcoming licensing changes. I wonder what ever happened..........
Even in the heydays of Java, desktop applications were never all that great. I remember how painfully slow Eclipse ran. And when I tried the WebStorm IDE a few years back, all the same problems still existed re memory management and some pronounced latency pressing a key and having the character appear on screen. WebStorm was also infamous for its code indexing runs, which pretty much froze my computer for a number of minutes. Not sure if that’s a Java problem though.
People criticise Electron, but honestly: applications like Slack, Spotify and VS Code run much better than the Java-based desktop apps that I got to use.