Java’s history is a thorny and convoluted one. From its origins at Sun, better known for its hardware than its software, Java was born as a stealth project targeting consumer devices. Along came the Web, and Java provided the only way to do anything remotely close to rich animation. Applets running on the HotJava Browser showcasing a dancing Duke was my “oh, now that’s cool” moment of 1995. So we set out to write enormously large applets that were slow to run and then the browser wars began and you could only guess whether it was going to run or your user would see a big gray box on their browsers....