A Plea to Sun. I have been a Java developer since JDK 1.0. I love the Java language and I love the Java APIs (for the most part). I have found Java to be a wonderful language for server-side programming as well as client-side programming. I have even written an applet or two in my days. I like Swing. I know a lot of people get down on Swing for performance reasons but I have seen massive improvements over the last year or two in that area. There is however one thing missing from the Java APIs, one thing that in my opinion is holding back Java from becoming a truly powerful client-side platform: there is no free, HTML 4.x/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript compliant web component in the Java toolkit.
I have been waiting for several years now. There was a glimmer of hope at one point when it was rumored that a version of the Netscape browser would be written in Java. Alas, it was not to be. Another glimmer of hope was (and is) provided by efforts to create a Java API to work with Mozilla. Alas, it is still a long way off from completion. Sun's own HTML component is aweful, providing some support for HTML 3 but not very good support at that.
So what can Sun do to remedy this situation? I suggest that Sun should either a.) license a browser component from a commercial vendor with a license that would allow them to distribute it with the Java Runtime, b.) purchase a commercial vendor which develops a pure Java web browser (IceSoft would be a prime candidate) or c.) work much closer with the Mozilla/Java developers to write a wrapper for accessing Mozilla through Java APIs.
Sun, you must do something at this point. Microsoft is looming and I am sure that more than a few projects have been written in Microsoft-friendly languages because of the lack of a browser component in the Java APIs.
Sincerely,
Anthony Eden [All Things Java]
I've gotta say I totally agree with Anthony here. I think having access to a real native browser from the Java would rock. Maybe the JVM could have a hook to try find a native browser component, then folks could maybe bundle the JVM with Mozilla if they wanted or swap out the browser and use another implementation (IE, Safari, Chimera etc) if required. All we'd need is a fairly simple API to create a BrowserComponent and add content to it and interact maybe with its JavaScript.
Though probably SWT will get this feature way before AWT or Swing. Already SWT has real native OLE support on windows, so its a fairly small step to add native browser support too.
