How ubiquitous is Java? Containers, VMs, etc..., ARE all the rage. Sun was correct as to what technology belongs to the future, they just couldn't position their company properly. Odds are we're all using technology that's part of Sun's legacy...

That wasn't the vision that I recall. Maybe part of some of it, but I'm talking about the Internet Terminal idea.

A lot of cool things came out of Sun. I don't think this was one. Have you tried Web IDEs? They're probably decades behind their desktop counterparts.

> Maybe part of some of it, but I'm talking about the Internet Terminal idea.

I'm pretty young, so I was woefully ignorant of this. However the more I read about it, the more it sounds like 'Cloud computing' and 'internet of things'. In fact, Chrome OS isn't too far from their Java Internet Terminal idea.

> Have you tried Web IDEs? They're probably decades behind their desktop counterparts.

I have. My main IDE, and probably my favourite ever, is R Studio which runs in a Webview (or as a webpage) and uses Ace for editing. Two fairly popular upstart IDEs, LightTable and Atom both use web technology. I quite enjoy Caret as well.

Not sure why you think they're decades behind. If anything the fact they're as advanced as they are is impressive, given most have been developed only in the last few years, whereas Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc..., have been around much longer.

> In fact, Chrome OS isn't too far from their Java Internet Terminal idea.

That's what I was getting at. That was 19 years ago.

> Not sure why you think they're decades behind.

I was thinking in person-hours. I don't mean to belittle them. But I feel like these are mostly "JustAnotherTextMate".

any good sources on sun's history?

Not really. Just Googled and found some old pages. Others could probably do better.

You mean like Atom? A lot of the web IDEs are pretty good nowadays. Not decades behind desktop software.

No. Atom is a text-editor with plugins. It's no more a competitor for IntelliJ than UltraEdit was a competitor to Visual Studio.NET. (IMO)

But I was actually talking about in-browser environments like CodeAnywhere.

Depending on the language and stack you choose, a text editor with a terminal and a REPL may be all you need. I spend most of my day switching between emacs, a terminal and a browser.

Atom is in-browser. It just so happens to ship with its own browser (Atom-Shell is based on Chromium)...

Are there any decent modern ones at all? I'm looking for a few, but don't want to re-invent the wheel.

There are orders of magnitude more UI kits for HTML/CSS then there are for native.

Is that because HTML/CSS UIs are more robust and advanced than native UI frameworks? Or because native UI framekits solved all the problems that the vast cornucopia of HTML/CSS UI frameworks are still struggling to solve? Or because everybody looks at all the HTML/CSS frameworks, decides none of them solve their problem, and decides to write their own?

It's because it's so easy to create your own. HTML/CSS is very accessible, well tested by lots and lots of small communities.

There are many HTML/CSS frameworks that are doing really great job and not struggling at all. It all depends of course on what you want to do, but finding a good kit that solves your problem is definitely not the bottleneck of creating a modern HTML UI based application.

> There are orders of magnitude more UI kits for HTML/CSS then there are for native.

of course you need them because working directly with hTML/CSS is total crap.

I don't think you can compare Angular with Cocoa.