Applets are officially, completely removed from Java 26, coming in March of 2026. This brings to an official end the era of applets, which began in 1996. However, for years it has been possible to build modern, interactive web pages in Java without needing applets or plugins. TeaVM (https://teavm.org) provides fast, performant, and lightweight tooling to transpile Java to run natively in the browser. And for a full front-end toolkit with templates, routing, components, and more, Flavour (https://flavour.sf.net) lets you build your modern single-page app using 100% Java.
The incredibly litigious company here is Deno. Deno sued on a whim, realized they were massively unprepared, then asked the public to fund a legal campaign that will benefit Deno themselves, a for-profit, VC-backed company.
This personal vendetta will likely end with the community unable to use the term JavaScript. Nobody should support this.
1. Oracle is the litigious one here. My favorite example is that time they attacked a professor for publishing less-than-glowing benchmarks of their database: https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/ What's to stop them from suing anyone using the term JavaScript in a way that isn't blessed by them? That's what Deno is trying to protect against.
2. Deno is filing a petition to cancel the trademark, not claim it themselves. This would return it to the public commons.
It should be obvious from these two facts that any member of the public that uses JavaScript should support this, regardless of what they think of Deno-the-company.
I like the idea of a distraction-free writing environment.
However, when I'm writing, I find I sometimes need to do research. I suppose for the best writing flow I should block time for research and time for pure writing. However, if I discover I need to look something up, a hard block on internet access would be a problem. Of course it's a slippery slope from researching something on Wikipedia to navigating to related articles. Timed access per hour?
> However, if I discover I need to look something up, a hard block on internet access would be a problem.
When I'm in "writing mode", I forbid myself from doing quick lookups, because I can almost never stick to the "quick" part of the process, and end up chasing rabbits. Instead, I just put something like (verify) or (research to confirm yay/nay) while writing, and move on to what I can do in the moment. Then much later do I go through with a "editor" mindset and address all those things in one go, rather than in the moment.
I guess kind of like picking work into a queue rather than doing it immediately, and leaving it hanging until I can work through the entire queue in one go.
The old timey trick is to write “TK”, for “look this up later”. It’s not a common letter combination so it’s easy to visually or automatically scan for. Example:
> The moon is TK miles from earth.
Write away, don’t get distracted by the details, and catch up afterward when you’ve shifted to editor mode.
They do, I use a custom one that has <NAME>TODO: so I can find stuff before I rebase, nothing should be pushed with that one, IntelliJ let’s you customise the colour by matching on a regex.
The solution is simple -- switch to another device!
Our minds are hard-wired to build habits via physical association. Having a single-purpose device very much fits with how our minds work. If we want to do research, then go to a research enabled device. If we want to focus on writing, then open the writing focused device.
I like https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/ and have used it for years and years, you can configure the look and feel pretty extensively.
Lots of ways to skin that cat (especially if you are a linux user) but focuswriter does everything I need, very little I don't and there is a frame/mindset shift to using the same tool for a specific task.
Even more basic, I will often use the Lookup option in the macOS right-click menu to get a quick definition just to make sure I have the right spelling correction. If it’s a correct spelling of a wrong word, that can be harder to find later and difficult to remember the intended word later.
For example…
Whether - expressing a doubt or choice between two alternatives.
I agree strong typing is a necessity in the front end. To prevent the language explosion issue, I recommend writing your single page apps in Java. The Flavour framework makes this quick and easy with complete maven tooling and powerful components.
The article isn’t about strong typing. It’s about static vs dynamic typing. For example, Python is strongly and dynamically typed.
Personally, I’d rather stop writing software than write everything in Java, and writing software is just about my favorite thing in the world. I don’t contend that Java is a bad language. However, it’s almost diametrically opposed to how I think about programming logic, and its style and conventions set my teeth on edge. I’m sure Java programmers would say the same about my preferences, too, and that’s OK! I’m not saying that my opinions are objectively right. But I am saying that no one would be willing to pay me what it would take to get me to write Java for a living.
You can use the Java ecosystem with a number of other languages that are completely different paradigms, like Scala or Clojure, or you can use Kotlin as a "better Java"
Sure, that would be my strategy if I were forced to. But honestly, I can’t imagine a likely scenario where a JVM language would be better for the kinds of things I do than a natively compiled language like Rust.
Yeah funny most proponents if static types don't even know the difference between static and strong types and often conflate the two. Show's how pervasive cargo culting is in this industry.
Great school. All- undergrad STEM education. Professors teach the classes, not TAs! And you have full access to the facilities of the 4 adjacent colleges (Pomona, CMC, Scripps, Pitzer), each prestigious in their own right.
Lots of detail and inside stories about the work it took to keep the web open and free.