From: Charles Oliver Nutter <headius@...>
Date: 2011-01-19T07:12:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Why Quby? (was Re: What are your ruby rough cuts ?)

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 5:20 AM, Joseph Lenton <jl235@kent.ac.uk> wrote:
> Charles Nutter wrote in post #975363:
>> I have to ask...does an applet not give you what you want? JRuby does
>> run fine in an applet, and with recent improvements to the Java
>> browser plugin it can do anything a Flash or other language plugin can
>> do (traverse and manipulate DOM, etc).
>
> That hadn't occurred to me, and would be the best option for getting
> Ruby running in a browser.
>
> However it wouldn't work well for my particular site. I've built lots of
> applets in the past and although they can work they are far from being
> as reliable as Flash or HTML 5. Java penetration is still pretty bad,
> only about 60% of users have Java 6 which is over now over 5 years old.
> No potential for ever targeting mobile devices. Lots of netbook OSs ship
> with Java, like ChromeOS. Start up time is still terrible (especially on
> low-end machines). Finally there are lots of smaller issues like caching
> bugs and differences in the implementation; I've seen several sites that
> host applets saying underneath "if it doesn't appear then try reloading"
> (you shouldn't need to have to write that).

All valid points. Part of the big push for JavaFX before Sun died
included improving the plugin. If they'd continued, they might have
been able to achieve better market penetration. The newer plugin had
much better startup characteristics, good performance, and better
access to the browser itself.

That work is continuing at Oracle, but it's still years out before
we'd see any uptick. If you require that your users have a working
application in-browser without any additional install, I agree
JavaScript is your best option. If you can control the user machines
and ensure they have Java+applets+latest plugin, JRuby's probably the
better option.

As far as mobile...JRuby works fine on Android devices, which is a
nontrivial segment of the market. But again the penetration is not as
high as JS in-browser.

Problems loading applets are usually the fault of the applet...they're
inconsistently erroring out at startup and not handling it properly.
That would affect badly-implemented code in any plugin system.

- Charlie