CoD Technologies

Java Applet

At the beginning of 1990’s web pages looked just a static text as follows: However, birth of Java language and with-it, Java applet in 1995 was a historical moment in the interactive web page. Applet was a tiny app, which would offer basic interactivity, games, visualization etc.

How it Worked?

Java applet would be embedded into a web page and work on the client side. The following video explains how applets worked and much more.

Advantages

The applet allowed better scalability as applets worked on the client-side Applet could be executed under many operating systems such as Unix, Linux, and macOS operating system. The applet was combined with HTML, CSS, and Javascript to provide more functionality to the web page The applet was very easy to build and contains very little redundancy. source

Disadvantages

Dependence on JVM and plugin to execute the applet
Without the proper plugin, there is no execution of the applet at the client side
Security was the main issue with trusted and untrusted applets source

Why was it deprecated?

All browsers removed support for plugin
GUI was very limited (color, font etc.)
Was not adaptive to people’s demand (ex. Video) and lost the market to competitor Flash
Security concerns source

What is Flash?

Flash was originally developed by other companies in 1990’s, however it was acquired by Adobe in 2005. It was a multimedia software platform that was used for many activities such as games, video streaming, animations, rich web applications to name a few. Flash is programmed with ActionScript language is a derivative of Emascript, which also serves as a standard for JavaScript language.

How it Worked?

It required users to install web browser plugin Flash Player. In the early 2000's Flash was installed by millions of people around the world.

It also helped many giants such as YouTube to launch their business, and for Nike, HP and others to promote their new products in a creatively interactive way.

This is the first video of YouTube:

Why was it deprecated?

Closed platform nature - it was not an open-source tool.
Not good performance on mobile (battery life)
Improved Javascript API
Mobile Web Browsers did not support Flash plugin. Especially Apple opposed to the idea of using the propritory, battery-thirsty software. This can be seen in Steve Job’s Letter.

JAVASCRIPT

Javascript (JS) is an object-oriented scripting language that was introduced in 1995 to add interactivity to otherwise static web pages and Netscape Navigator was the first browser that supported it. Later Microsoft not only released its own browser Internet Explorer, which led to browser wars, but also created its own version of JavaScript called JScript. Though it was initially launched as a lightweight language, in 1998, when Microsoft was a sole player dominating the browser market JavaScript's importance grew one and became one of the prominent web technologies. The name Java was included in its name because it would be advantageous to have somewhat similar name to Java, which was popular at that time. During its first decade JS was not used extensively, however, all changed when JIT compiler for JavaScript became available in early 2000’s.

How JS works?

Javascript on the client-side works dynamically, responding to user events such as mouse click, form input, hover etc. The following form is used to display how based on age the content changes.

If you were to live up to 90 years, by entering your age you can calculate how many weeks and months left.

Your Age:

Advantages

Speed: As JavaScript is an interpreted language and makes execution of the faster. It also improves performance with its DOM and built-in functions for loop.
Simplicity: It is very easy to learn and implement, which save time for developing dynamic websites
Popularity: Since JS is supported by all browsers, it is used by many.
Interoperability: it can be integrated with other languages source

Why JS is still used?

The simple answer is it is supported by all browsers and it has very fast JIT(Just-in-time)compiler, which makes it more reliable.

WEB ASSEMBLY

“WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.“

Though Wasm has compact binary format, it also provides debugger in text format. In addition, it was not developed to replace JavaScript but to complement it.

Advantages

Performance: Binary format is efficient for load-time.
Portability: You can work cross-browser.
Flexiblity: With WebAssembly, web browsers can run any language on the browser.

Disadvantages

Complexity: Unlike other high-level languages, WASM is a low-level language, which be difficult to learn.
Security: Despite using sandboxing for the executable code, it was found that binary codes were misused by malicious attackers