

Ask HN: what are some software technologies which have come and gone away? - amenghra

I'm trying to list various web/software technologies which have gone extinct over the years (think Microsoft's Clippy, Swatch's .beat time, abusing imagemaps in web design, etc.).<p>What do you think were the most interesting technologies or concepts which didn't survive the test of time?<p>Note: I'm not really interested in hardware related things, so please don't diverge on the topic of typewriters, alarm clocks or pay phones.
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zerohp
The peer to peer internet didn't survive. NAT ruined it, and now nobody has an
expectation of connecting directly to another machine thats not set up for the
sole purpose of hosting services.

Based on what people say in the IPv6 threads, I don't think people realize
what we've lost.

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troymc
VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML>

The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) has a page listing all HTML elements. The
non-standard, obsolete, or deprecated ones are dimmed:

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element>

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epc
S-HTTP was pitched as an alternative to SSL but died very quickly as neither
MSIE nor Netscape Navigator supported it. My memory is fuzzy about it now but
I recall one of the "advantages" being that you could selectively encrypt
portions of a page. I also recall it being very convoluted to set up and
maintain vs. encrypt everything over port 443.

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arkitaip
Applets.

Shockwave.

jQuery made low-level DOM manipulation more or less obsolete.

So much of server side Java has been abandon for more lightweight alternatives
that don't suffer from XMLitis and layers and layers of abstraction.

~~~
eranation
Sadly, very sadly, there is more server side Java code written each day than
Ruby, Django, Node combined (I know, citation needed, don't have one, call it
a hunch). Think of all the enterprise businesses, banks, corporations,
insurance companies, wall street, healthcare IT, RCM, ERP etc - all the
enterprise world still runs Spring, Hibernate, JSF, etc. So it might not be
popular in Silicon Valley, but open the jobs at indeed / linked in, you'll be
pretty much shocked how small is the RoR/Django/Node SV world compared to all
the other poor fellas doing jar hell. But even if you look at the startup
world, JVM shops are not completely gone, Google is doing lot's of Java, so do
VMWare, Twitter, Foursquare etc. So as opposed to Applets , server side EJBs,
ESBs, AbstractFactorySingletonBeanFilters have not gone away (yet) and will
stay for longer than COBOL code probably (that runs your ATM)

But to your question, I would add to the list:

XML Data Islands [1]

JavaFX [2]

Silverlight (in 2020) [3]

[1] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/desktop/ms76...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/desktop/ms766512\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[2]
[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/index...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/index.html)

[3] [http://gigaom.com/2010/10/29/microsoft-giving-up-on-
silverli...](http://gigaom.com/2010/10/29/microsoft-giving-up-on-silverlight-
joining-html5-party/)

~~~
memracom
JVM shops don't only do Java. They also do Clojure and Scala and Groovy.
Grails is a Rails-like framework for Groovy on the JVM. And there is also a
lot of Ruby running on the JVM in addition to Python and even PHP.

In fact, if you need to integrate legacy Java applications with newer non-Java
stuff, it is easiest to do it with Scala or Clojure so that you can continue
using the same libraries. And if you want to get completely away from old-
school Java and use the newest and most innovative languages, chances are that
you will be using Scala with Akka on the JVM, or Clojure on the JVM.

There is still good stuff that is outside the JVM or .NET worlds, such as
Python, but the idea of an ecosystem built around a bytecode vm is very
powerful and has a long life ahead of it, particularly the JVM and .NET.

~~~
EnderMB
But the above point still stands. In silicon valley, sure, some people are
writing on top of the JVM using Scala, Clojure, Jython and every other cool
JVM based language around, but in the real world you'll find a lot of people
are still using straight-up Java, and they're happy with it!

Java will always dominate, mainly because every single year the workforce is
flooded with graduates that have been taught CS using Java, mostly because
they want to keep their employment stats up and Java is where the jobs are.
Some universities in the UK also use C# on occasion because .NET is quite
strong in agencies.

Your point is absolutely correct, but I cannot see companies in the real world
switching from Java to another language on the JVM without a genuine business
benefit for doing so. I also think it will be a while until people stop
writing new projects in Java, because so many people graduate knowing mostly
(sometimes only) Java.

