Web client development technology for java fundamentalist

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I am a java developer and I would like to develop rich clients for the web. My problem is that I hate javascript, flash, etc. and most of the programming languages usually used for web client. I would be happy to keep doing java to develop web clients that may be used on common web browsers and, why not, on new fashion mobile devices. I am looking for some advices/warnings to make a good choice.

Java applet seems perfect for my case, but according to some rumors, it is not a really sustainable solution. Should I have a look at JavaFX? GWT? Are there some other possibilities?

manpreet 2 years ago

What do you want to do? Vaadin is based on GWT and therefore utilizes HTML5 + JavaScript which is much slower than a Java Applet. I have tried boat and Applets with Swing is A LOT faster than Vaadin.

With Java Applets, Swing and Hessian you have unbeatable performance for business applications. Hessian is a very fast binary web service protocol. With JavaScript you are usually limited to text-encoded web service protocols like Json and various XML-based protocols. Text-based protocols consume a lot of CPU, memory and bandwidth compared to binary protocols - and they don't really provide you with any advantage at all.

The weak point of Applets is hardware accelerated graphics like OpenGL and multimedia. If you are developing games or movie players Applets is not that great.

JavaFX promise to fix hardware accelerated graphics performance and video codecs. With your description it is not clear if you need to wait for that.

However if you really need more than what standard applets will provide you than web start may be a solution. Its a bit like the old ActiveX with signed or unsigned application that gets extra privileges - either by being signed by sun or by asking the user. This will allow you to use JOGL or a 3d scene graph engine.