When Bruce Eckel wrote "It’s clear that we can’t wait for Sun to fix all of Java’s problems," he possibly hadn't reckoned that his essay would provoke a huge response the length and breadth of Javaland. 40,000+ SYS-CON.com readers read what Eckel had to say. And responses are still coming in thick and fast.

"Excellent article...should be required reading for all developers," wrote Mike McManus; while Carl "The Truth" Williams commented, somewhat less enthusiastically:  "Is it 1998? That is when all the rest of us realized Java was dead in the browser."

One of the central passages of Eckel's article concerned a somewhat unflattering account of how the "Father of Java," James Gosling, in his capacity as team leader, was - by Eckel's account - complicit in rushing Java to market:

"We must ask why Java applets haven't become ubiquitous on the internet as the client-side standard for RIAs....This is an especially poignant question because Gosling and team justified rushing Java out the door (thus casting in stone many poorly-considered decisions) so that it could enable the internet revolution. That's why the AWT and Applets were thrown in at the last second, reportedly taking a month from conception to completion."

And yet, such revelations aside, it wasn't so much what Eckel had to say about Java that ruffled developers' feathers; it was his recommendation, as the only serious alternative (in his view) for deploying Rich Internet Applications, of Flash/Flex. 

One reader, signing himself just Rob, commented: "I agree with the article concerning the assessment of the problem, but not with the solution."

He continued:

"When you get down to it, what is the core problem? Lack of consistent and usable standards. This article wouldn't exist if the web had decided to follow standards, but greed and power struggles caused companies to do their own thing. The web runs off of web browsers. And who is most to blame for the dividing of the web? Not Sun, but Microsoft and Internet Explorer. IE development and standards support stagnated, thereby crippling the web for the years to follow with non-standard extensions, bad CSS support, and general stubbornness to ignore anything better that didn't come out of their own company.

 

But the *real problem* is that people wanted something to "just work" and they wanted it NOW. So they decided to be "pragmatic" (i.e. short sighted) and forsake the future for the sake of the present. Tying the web to the future of a single company is what broke the web, and now you suggest that we adopt Flash? Flash is not an open-standard. It is a product decided by Adobe. You're suggesting as a solution the very root of the problem you're criticizing. If we neglect improvements in other areas simply because we have Flash today, the result will be that in the future if Adobe does something we don't like or something better comes out, we're stuck."

Haig Evans-Kavaldjian wasn't keen on Eckel's recommendation of Flash either:

"Flash, to my knowledge, has always been and still remains an accessibility nightmare. Again, another trend/truth: we all benefit from a focus on accesibility. Almost anyone stuck in a traffic jam has thought, "Gee, wouldn't it be great if I could access my email (or newsfeed, or calendar, or whatever) via voice while I'm sitting here in my car?" You don't have to be blind to have a need for accessible software, you just need to be in a specific context. I understand Adobe, and Macromedia before them, have said they are committed to making Flash accessible -- but what's the reality? Is Flash really more accessible now, both in terms of inherent capability, but even more important, in the mindset of the developers who employ it? My gut feeling is -- at least for the latter concern -- the answer is no, Flash developers don't rank accessibility high on their list of concerns. Too bad for us all."

The Eckel essay having been Slashdotted, the community at large had the chance to add its 2c to the discussion, including Ben Crowell who had this to say about Flash/Flex, viewed from his point of view as an open source developer:

"Uh, I've got a complaint. I installed Flash 9 on my Ubuntu box, and it didn't "just work." It crashed my browser. I had to deinstall it and reinstall Flash 8.

 

I spent a bunch of time about a month ago looking into the idea of using Flash as a platform for writing OSS. At the end, I concluded that it just wasn't a viable choice.

1. A full, usable Flex development environment from Adobe costs bucks.
2. There are OSS compilers: MTASC and haxe. MTASC only supports AS2, and although haxe can generate AS3 code, haxe is not the same language as AS3. So in other words, there are severe problems with source-level compatibility if you want to do AS3 using OSS compilers.
3. The version 2 component library (for programming GUIs) comes with a license that prevents you from using it unless you own the Flash IDE. There are alternative OSS GUI libraries for flash, but then you don't have source-code compatibility with any code that was written for Flex.
4. The only supported audio codec is mp3, which is under patent in the U.S. That's why, for example, mp3 codecs are not included in Debian, and if you live in the U.S., you have to download the codecs from overseas servers.
5. The only supported video codec is proprietary, although you really can't blame Adobe for this, since there is no usable, patent-free video codec at the present time. (Theora is not practical to use yet.)

So basically Flash is a totally proprietary platform from A to Z. You buy a flash book and try to compile any of the nontrivial programs in it without paying money to Adobe, and it won't work. I got "hello world" to work with MTASC, and beyond that, it just wasn't possible; there's just not enough source-level compatibility.

Why in the world would anyone want to hitch their wagon to YAPPL (Yet Another Proprietary Programming Language)???"

Peter Colijn agrees with Crowell, and writes that he has the solution: stick to AJAX...

"I propose instead that we work on cleaning up the mess that is HTML, CSS and AJAX. No, it's not going to be easy, but with the increased interest in these technologies it will move quicker than it has before."

The debate continues here.