There’s an interesting manifesto on Trephine.org on why applets continue to fail, and why they still matter. The essay ultimately serves to promote Trephine’s product, which is essentially an applet that claims to fix the problems the company outlines, but it’s still interesting as a glimpse of what was intended to be the medium for Java to interact with end users way back in the mid-90s.I was struck by two assertions on either side of Trephine ledger sheet. One reason applets failed, so the story goes, is that the diversity of JVMs just became too much to expect developers to build to; but applets hold great promise because Java, in one form or another, is so widespread. As near as I can tell, JavaFX is meant to paper over that diversity. The question that arises, then, is how do we prevent that fracturing from recurring? Will experience lead folks to get it right this time? Or will the drive to tweak the platform for every niche inevitably give rise to more fractures? Software Development