Comment on All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding | by Dan Fabulich | Apr, 2025
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 days agoThanks, that was a fun read.
Preaching to the choir wrt js and how it’s just piling on and on. But then I did say I’m 5.
So WebAssembly could have been a development of Java apps on the web? I vaguely remember that used to be a thing long ago. And Java Web Start is just that? Or is it “to finally start to approach some pale imitation of a decent thing now”?
grue@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Basically, we could’ve had more or less what we’re just now getting with WebAssembly two and a half decades ago with Java Web Start. They’re not completely equivalent — WebAssembly can run any(?) language and interacts with the system via browser APIs, whereas Java Web Start could only run JVM languages (which was an even worse limitation back in the day since things like Kotlin and Scala didn’t exist yet) but interacted with the system using the more desktop-application-oriented Java Class Library. I think JWS applications would still have the advantage over Electron/WebAssembly applications in terms of user experience and feeling “native” (especially since a lot of web apps gave up even trying to resemble native UIs), but would probably be clunkier from a developer perspective since whatever solution they came up with instead of AJAX would likely not be as flexible due to nature of Java vs. JavaScript (statically typed and compiled vs. barely typed and interpreted).
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 day ago
For easy things this comes up in Google tcljava.sourceforge.net/docs/website/index.html . I was playing with LEGO TBH.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 days ago
Thanks again! I wasn’t sure where the terms belong on the timeline.