Canonical adds extra shots to Ubuntu Java

Canonical has some extra toppings, flavorings, and offers coming for its bigger Java fans – because the suits swallow a lot of the stuff. A cluster of related announcements from the house of Ubuntu indicate it is taking Java – and supporting Java – seriously. It's introducing its own builds of OpenJDK and offering extended …

[PerlyKing]

Re: You don't tend to see it around much anymore

Really? I'm probably blinkered by working with Java every day for one of the world's bigger financial companies, but has the Reg's audience really devolved into a bunch of script-kiddies playing with whatever the cool new language du jour is? Or Python? ;-)

Otherwise, thanks for another interesting article!

[Caspian Prince]

Re: You don't tend to see it around much anymore

It is generally everywhere, thought not in very many exciting places. Particularly disgruntled that it hasn't gained enough traction for front-end, or videogames.

[LionelB]

Re: You don't tend to see it around much anymore

Hmm... the only application I use (on a daily basis) with a Java front-end is Matlab, and it's an unedifying experience. Matlab uses Java for its desktop and graphics functionality. In both cases, the GUI is unstable and extremely unpretty. Pretty much the only crashes I've ever had with Matlab turn out to be Java-related. It's a car-crash, to the extent that I generally run Matlab in console mode with the JVM turned off, and use a separate program (Gnuplot) for graphics.

Perhaps this is just poor coding, but it's surprising, since apart from the Java elements Matlab is generally rock-solid (despite, some might say, being mostly written in C and C++).

Of course YMMV.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You don't tend to see it around much anymore

Java's GUI history isn't great; first the AWT, then Swing, then JavaFX, then no JavaFX, and there has been talk of getting rid of Swing too. This doesn't inspire confidence in developers - we ship an API with a Swing interface, and the Swing side is getting no new work done to it.

WIth no changes from Oracle in the last 15 years or so, Swing is looking very old as an API - it's unnecessarily complex, very verbose and once you start introducing threading, it's very easy to get wrong (this, I know). The rest of Java is rock solid but Swing wouldn't be anyone's first choice if starting a new GUI project in 2025 - I'd be using HTML+CSS+SVG+JS myself.