Bruce Eckel (author of Thinking in Java) on his personal transition from Java to Flash/Flex for RIAs (rich internet applications). He chronicles his disillusionment with client-side Java on the web/desktop, from the early, optimistic days of “Write once, run anywhere,” to the current state of affairs, where Java applets on the web are virtually non-existent, and Ajax / Flash have become what Java always wanted to be. And Ajax, he argues, has already pushed JavaScript just about as far as it’s going to go, leaving Flash/Flex as the only real contender for quality RIAs. Only he says it much better than I can.
It’s not impossible to build GUI applications with Java, but it’s been 10 years and there are still installation hiccups with applets, Java WebStart, and regular applications. After 10 years, people don’t trust it anymore. If it’s not there after 10 years, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say that someone doesn’t consider this problem important enough to fix. And even if they did, there have been so many bad experiences among consumers that it would take years to get the trust back.