[specialist]

Java Applets had great promise. Early interest was high. For the life of me, I can't phantom how Sun managed to biff this one. I'm among the biggest Java fans, so my disappointment is acute.

#1 - Netscape. Their Java support always sucked. Broken thread implementation. The joke was write once debug everywhere. The early troubles soured most and Sun lost the precious mindshare. Relying on a third party for the success of Java was a huge mistake.

#2 - Sun killed their HotJava web browser, written in Java. It was the ideal applet platform. Ran great. Had a great UI for the time. Imagine if they'd kept that going.

#3 - Sun waited until Java 6, a full decade, to revamp their Java plugin. Way too late to make a difference.

#4 - AWT controls looked terrible, were too minimal. But Swing was just too heavy. The design was great for time, being the logical successor to NextStep -> Cocoa -> Netscape IFC development line. But Sun never put it on a diet, either the API or the payload.

(Thanks for the floating point parse bug tip. Writing a web server using Netty, that's a good one to know.)