🚀 go-pugleaf

My *personal* $0.02:

   I do not think applets and web browsers have much future in the
bigger game of internet applications.  Web browsers, HTML, and Applets
are nice - but VERY limited and not at all useful for real application
development.  Java class servers that operate without the impedance of
*heavyweight* web browsers on the client will deliver the 'real'
internet applications of the future.  A good class server will also take
care of the 'client has the wrong JRE' problems seamlessly.
   The real future of Java depends on the performance improvements of
the VMs, quality of the development environments, and cooperation among
big players for its language specification.  The real value of Java is
the 'write-once-deploy-anywhere' feature.  This doesn't mean you
necessarily deploy your Java bytecode and it runs perfectly everywhere. 
We have already learned that that doesn't work (yet?). 
Write-once-deploy-anywhere means a company can hire a team of developers
that all work together on the same codebase - and deploy it to a variety
of different platforms using platform targeted native compilation,
bundling with a tested JRE for the target platform, or using the
absolute lowest common denominator functionality and trusting that the
bytecode deployment will be safe.

   We (the proponents of the Java platform) have a lot of work to do
yet...  Stay tuned.

 - Joe Nuxoll