Pulpcore
Recently I came across an OpenSource project designed to make java more updated with simple 2D game programming. Flash, Silverlight and other secondary tools have long since dominate this client side, interactive coding portion of the web. HTML 5 is still in its infancy, and ultimately painful to implement. Of course, to some, Java is as painful to learn. But for most people who have been taking advantage of Java’s server side power, it would be relatively fun to go back to GUI programming.
Pulpcore is really not a brand new idea. Java’s applet attempts back in the mid ninties was a complete failure, yet super foresight on Sun’s part. Java Applet’s failure is actually due to the limitation in computing power back in the 90s. The Java VM is not light to load and run, yet most computers back then would have been under 100 mhz! That is like a joke compared to today’s cpu speed, measured in GHz instead!
So if there is a way to load the applet code without all the annoying java protection, java can actually be more efficient then flash!