I started writing Java applets on the Web in 1995 as soon as that became possible, but stopped cold turkey in August 2013, after Oracle (which had acquired it as part of Sun Microsystems) stopped allowing the general public to access unsigned Java applets. That summer I completely switched over to Javascript and WebGL for both my research and teaching, and have never looked back.
But until then, Java was revolutionary in its effect on scientific communication. For the first time ever, anybody anywhere could access interactive computer graphics from a Web browser.
This was a radical reframing that had a profound and lasting effect on the way we think about interacting with computers. Oracle may have effectively killed the Java applet, but it couldn’t stop the revolution that James Gosling’s Web-friendly language had started.
We now take for granted that from any Web browser you can interact with your computer or phone in all sorts of rich and powerful ways, but that was not always so. Today being the 30th anniversary of the first public introduction of the Java programming language, let’s take a moment to appreciate its profound influence.