the NEWT display variant doesn’t afaik,
Aha that’s the newfangled JDK7 / Prism / JavaFX plugin thingy?
Cas 
no, NEWT is JogAmp’s own native windowing system.
I will just repeat
1# Java failed on the desktop because Sun never bothered creating an application shop for java applications. You should have been able to launch “Java Control” and find a list of all java applications installed on your desktop and manage them from there. Some kind of Java OS layer on the top of windows.
2#J2SE is good because of backward compatiblity but it has grown thick and fat. Too many useless classes. Keep it for those who need it.
3#Sun should have taken the J2ME core classes Graphics, Canvas and bases classes like String and build a super lean super light framework. Scrap the LCDUI package. Scrap Vector. Keep backward compatiblity of bytecode.
4# on top of the lean base framework, create a Swing module and Game Interface module. Make it so you can load Base+GameInterface without loading Swing.
That is a very minor (if at all) factor IMO. Flash didn’t (and doesn’t) have an “application shop” and that didn’t prevent it from becoming the de-facto standard for web games.
Agreed. There have basically been two periods when Sun made a serious effort to improve Java on the desktop. The first was around the 1.4 release, and the other was before the release of 6 update 10. In both these time periods the concept of an App Store did not exist yet.
So Java is no longer included in Mac OS… this presumably means that OpenJDK should be generally available for Mac really soon.
Cas
Wow you can read my mind. Not only that, but I actually did all those things and more all by myself. Since, I have no funding I can’t really drive my stuff very fast. I just turtle along with FreeBlisket and the AllBinary Platform. I only have half a million lines of code and shit to myself. It is sad really, but I love making software. Oh wells.
well, at the time it was not called “app shop”. I remember when Java Web Start came along. That was brilliant. Why not having a favorite list of JNLPs? A tool to manage downloaded JNLPs? They did nothing else but provide the mechanism of Java Web Start. They didn’t bother building the bells and whistles. They might have coined the word “app store” before Apple if they did some end user/desktop work at the time.
Back then I was thinking, build a bloody Java OS layer over Windows. They did not. too bad.
It is like the failed Savaje os/phone. Sun is a failure in end user experience. You can’t win it all. Their core competence was server side.
For a highly website-integrated GUI application like my own, Java was the best way to go. .NET ClickOnce sucks and is Windows-only, and system GUI widgets don’t work in Flash. The second best way would be to use a custom protocol handler, but that would require an installation… with Web Start you just have to click a link. Putting out updates is a snap too.
Beyond desktop games, I think mobile gaming is where it’s at, but Oracle seems more interested in pushing their server technologies than anything else.