Oracle Is Deprecating The Java Web-Browser Plugin With Java 9

[anarki2]

Yay! No more IPMI management! I'll just reset the server whenever it fails!

[Passso]

Standalone it still has its uses and its place. The crossplatform nature of standalone applications developed in Java does make it viable still. Regarding deprecating the web-browser plugin -- That was to be expected; I'm kind of surprised it took this long. Haven't run across a website that I'd use regularly that actually requires Java. And haven't done so... in years.

As Java was very popular in the end of 90's when everyone was switching massively from paper to hard drives, big enterprises still use it a lot.
Bank headquarters for example are full of java-based websites for internal apps. IT managers will start crying soon, or they will, as always, put a "good old" XP legacy PC with IE to do the job... for ages!

[bug77]

As Java was very popular in the end of 90's when everyone was switching massively from paper to hard drives, big enterprises still use it a lot.
Bank headquarters for example are full of java-based websites for internal apps. IT managers will start crying soon, or they will, as always, put a "good old" XP legacy PC with IE to do the job... for ages!

Some fact checking:

http://www.sitepoint.com/best-programming-language-learn-2015-job-demand-salaries/

http://www.codingdojo.com/blog/9-most-in-demand-programming-languages-of-2016/

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

As Java was very popular in the end of 90's when everyone was switching massively from paper to hard drives, big enterprises still use it a lot.

One (contracted) word: Minecraft.

[Chewi]

Gentoo Java lead here! I predicted this would happen given that Chrome has already dropped NPAPI and Firefox probably will. If for some god awful reason you still need the plugin (and you can find a browser that still supports it, maybe SeaMonkey?), the IcedTea-Web project maintains a perfectly good alternative, as well as its own Web Start implementation.

As for Java, it may not be my day job but it's not dead by a very long shot.

[newwen]

My only use case right now for java applets is signing in to goverment websites or signing web form data with my smartcard. W3C WebCrypto doesn't seem to be ready for that task since it lacks smartcard key discovery

[GreatEmerald]

My only use case right now for java applets is signing in to goverment websites or signing web form data with my smartcard. W3C WebCrypto doesn't seem to be ready for that task since it lacks smartcard key discovery

Here you're expected to fiddle around with the browser settings a bit for that to work. No big deal though, as far as I can see.

[Passso]

Gentoo Java lead here! I predicted this would happen given that Chrome has already dropped NPAPI and Firefox probably will. If for some god awful reason you still need the plugin (and you can find a browser that still supports it, maybe SeaMonkey?), the IcedTea-Web project maintains a perfectly good alternative, as well as its own Web Start implementation.

As for Java, it may not be my day job but it's not dead by a very long shot.

A friend of mine still works in Cobol (1959!), so you may have work in Java till the end of the world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL

[Azrael5]

html5 is able to replace java?

[DanLamb]

Oracle may be formally deprecating the browser plugin now, but it has been informally deprecated for many years, the Java community stopped using it or thinking about it a long time ago, and it's only been used for a few weird legacy uses. Java itself is still massively popular for server-side computing. Especially, other languages, like Scala+Clojure and maybe Frege, and data frameworks like Spark or Hadoop. Java 9's big feature is Jigsaw modularity. Jigsaw may hopefully native app packaging + distribution. It has a ton of smaller features. The native Java REPL will be nice. There are other REPL options today (Groovy, Scala, Beanshell), but having a fully native officially supported REPL will be nice. Things like HTTP 2.0 are standard in third party libs. More exciting is Project Valhalla (Java 10?) which supports VM level value types. “Codes like a class, works like an int!” This is a simple tuple/record/struct type that has high runtime performance comparable to primitives like "int". It's immutable which solves a lot of user confusion and enables a lot of internal optimization. This has been a top Java feature request since day one. Lots of people want to use a point/vector type or even a complex number type. Right now, if you implement those with a class, you pay a runtime performance penalty, so many people stick to int/double. Also, types like Optional should benefit from this and become near-zero overhead. Lastly, other JVM languages like Scala should heavily benefit from this. Scala has excellent native tuple syntax and immutable record "case classes" (like a named tuple in Python), but currently those compile down to JVM classes. Ideally, that would compile to the new JVM value type and get better runtime performance.