Back in 2001 or so one of my friends told me when he heard I was experimenting with Delphi that all these Delphi, VB and C++ are dead and soon there will be only Java.
About a week ago I cooked up a list of free patch editors and managers of external synths and samplers for the recently started linuxsound.ru. And now that yet another shovel for amateur grave diggers vintage synth manager is out, I thought I’d have a closer look.
Well, guess what. There really is a bunch of Java patch editors for ext. synths written in 2000-2004. Those are mostly dead projects. How about new applications? All, and no — I really mean all of them are written in Qt/C++. Have a look yourself, why don’t you: QXGEdit, ME-Edit, FB01 Sound Editor, Fx FloorBoard, qtpod and now Yamaha DX7-II synth manager.
And since I’m basically evil, I can’t resist recalling how principle developer of Protux went mad some years ago and decided to redo everything in Java, praising this technology and saying how much better everything will become, since he was an experienced Java developer at IBM. Remon, who joined the team shortly before that, disagreed and continued development of the tool under a new name and in Qt/C++.
You don’t need to be a wizard to see through the whole thing: the Java port miserably failed. At the same time Traverso is still alive, and even though it’s probably not kicking, but merely prodding, development continues, new features are being added, UI is being improved and so on.
I’m trying to think of any desktop Java application I used in the past years, and FreeMind is the only one I can recall (and even so it’s a sad example, because 0.9.0 has been WIP for years). So I’m curious, when did you guys and girls last used a desktop application in Java on daily basis?