Picture this: It's 1997. You just downloaded the JDK 1.1 from Sun's website after waiting 45 minutes on your 56k modem. You're about to "Write Once, Run Anywhere™" and revolutionize the internet with Java applets. Netscape Navigator is open, your cup of coffee is steaming, and you're building the future.
And you know what? You were right. You were building the future—just not in the way anyone expected at the time.
The Visionaries Who Believed
When Java burst onto the scene in 1995, Sun Microsystems made some audacious promises, and you believed in them:
- Write Once, Run Anywhere: Your code would run on any platform without recompiling
- No Pointers: Automatic memory management would free you from C++ pointer hell
- Internet-Ready: Java applets would replace static HTML with interactive applications
- Enterprise-Grade: Java would power the next generation of business applications
You didn't just buy into the hype—you made it real. And while the path wasn't what anyone predicted, your work laid the foundation for everything that came after.
The Applet Era: You Dared to Dream Bigger
You remember Java applets, don't you? Of course you do.
In the late '90s, you genuinely believed applets would replace HTML. And why not? Why settle for boring static pages when you could deliver interactive Java applications right in the browser?
import java.applet.Applet;
import java.awt.Graphics;
public class HelloWorld extends Applet {
public void paint(Graphics g) {
g.drawString("Hello, World!", 50, 25);
}
}
You embedded this in HTML:
<applet code="HelloWorld.class" width="300" height="200">
Your browser doesn't support Java. Please download the JRE!
</applet>
Yes, you dealt with:
- 30+ second load times (and explained them to impatient users)
- Convincing users to download and install the Java plugin
- JRE version incompatibilities that made deployment a nightmare
- Security warnings that scared away half your users
- UIs that looked out of place on every platform
- Flash developers who smugly showed off their faster load times
By 2000, the industry moved on from applets. But you spent years mastering them, troubleshooting them, and yes—delivering real applications with them. That experience wasn't wasted. You learned about client-side computing, sandbox security, and cross-platform challenges that informed everything that came after.
The IDE Wars: You Had to Choose Your Weapon
Unlike developers in the Microsoft ecosystem who had Visual Studio handed to them, you had to navigate a landscape of competing tools and make strategic decisions for your team.
You chose from:
Notepad + Command Line: Some of you were the hardcore engineers typing
javac HelloWorld.javaandjava HelloWorldin terminals. You knew every compiler flag by heart.JBuilder by Borland: You convinced your company to spend $3,000 per seat. You mastered its visual designers for Swing. You somehow made it run on machines with only 256MB of RAM.
Visual J++: Some of you used Microsoft's Java IDE, navigating the legal drama between Microsoft and Sun while appreciating that it was actually... pretty good.
NetBeans: The early adopters among you championed Sun's official IDE, sticking with it through the rough early versions because you believed in the vision.
Eclipse: When it dropped in 2001, many of you jumped ship immediately. You recognized a game-changer when you saw one and convinced your teams to migrate.
IntelliJ IDEA: A few prescient souls discovered JetBrains in 2001, became evangelists, and never looked back. You were ahead of your time.
You didn't just use these tools—you became experts in them, wrote plugins for them, and helped your teams standardize on them. The "IDE wars" weren't just about software; they were about the communities you built and the workflows you pioneered.
Java 1.0-1.4: You Were There for Every Release
You lived through the evolution. You migrated codebases through every major version:
Java 1.0 (1996):
You worked with just 211 classes in the API. You built production systems with this. You made AWT work despite its limitations. You were there at the very beginning.
Java 1.1 (1997):
You cheered when inner classes finally arrived. You evangelized JavaBeans to your organization. You learned JDBC and finally had a decent way to talk to databases. You wrestled with RMI and made distributed systems work.
Java 1.2 (1998) - "Java 2":
You migrated your UIs from AWT to Swing. You studied the new Collections Framework even though you had years of muscle memory with Vector and Hashtable. You watched the JIT compiler make your applications finally, finally competitive on performance.
Java 1.3 (2000):
You took the performance improvements and ran with them. You made JNDI work in your enterprise applications. Not every release was glamorous, but you showed up and delivered.
Java 1.4 (2002):
You celebrated when regular expressions finally arrived. You mastered NIO for high-performance applications. You adopted the Logging API and started replacing all those System.out.println calls (eventually). You integrated XML processing because it was the 2000s and XML was everywhere.
The Verbosity: You Typed Every Character
Java was verbose. You know this better than anyone because you typed every single character.
Want to read a file? You wrote:
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
public class FileReaderExample {
public static void main(String[] args) {
BufferedReader reader = null;
try {
reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("file.txt"));
String line;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(line);
}
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
try {
if (reader != null) {
reader.close();
}
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
}
Twenty-two lines to read a file. You made sure to close it in finally because you understood resource management at a deep level. Try-with-resources wouldn't arrive until Java 7 (2011), so you did it the hard way for years.
You wrote countless getters and setters:
public class Person {
private String name;
private int age;
public String getName() {
return name;
}
public void setName(String name) {
this.name = name;
}
public int getAge() {
return age;
}
public void setAge(int age) {
this.age = age;
}
}
Your IDE could generate these, but you maintained them. You understood encapsulation at a level that younger developers who use records might never fully appreciate.
The Enterprise Java Challenge: You Tamed the Beast
While applets faded, you were building the enterprise systems that still run businesses today. Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) were complex, but you mastered them.
To create a simple entity bean in EJB 1.0/2.0, you wrote:
- A remote interface
- A home interface
- A local interface
- A local home interface
- The bean implementation class
- Deployment descriptors (XML, so much XML)
Here's what you dealt with:
// Remote Interface
public interface CustomerRemote extends EJBObject {
String getName() throws RemoteException;
void setName(String name) throws RemoteException;
}
// Home Interface
public interface CustomerHome extends EJBHome {
CustomerRemote create() throws RemoteException, CreateException;
CustomerRemote findByPrimaryKey(Integer id) throws RemoteException, FinderException;
}
// Bean Implementation
public class CustomerBean implements EntityBean {
private String name;
public String ejbCreate() throws CreateException {
return null;
}
public void ejbPostCreate() { }
public void ejbActivate() { }
public void ejbPassivate() { }
public void ejbRemove() { }
public void ejbLoad() { }
public void ejbStore() { }
public void setEntityContext(EntityContext ctx) { }
public void unsetEntityContext() { }
public String getName() { return name; }
public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; }
}
Plus 50+ lines of XML configuration that you debugged without modern tooling.
When Rod Johnson wrote Spring Framework in 2002, you understood exactly why. Many of you were early Spring adopters who helped shape the framework that would transform the ecosystem. You saw the problems clearly because you'd lived them.
J2EE: You Spoke the Language
You didn't just learn these acronyms—you became fluent in an entire ecosystem:
- JNDI: Java Naming and Directory Interface
- JDBC: Java Database Connectivity
- JSP: JavaServer Pages
- JSTL: JSP Standard Tag Library
- EJB: Enterprise JavaBeans
- JMS: Java Message Service
- JTA: Java Transaction API
- JAF: JavaBeans Activation Framework
- JAAS: Java Authentication and Authorization Service
- RMI: Remote Method Invocation
- CORBA: Common Object Request Broker Architecture
You could walk into any company and know exactly what they meant by their architecture diagrams. You were worth $150/hour as a consultant because you'd actually built these systems in production.
Web Development: You Built the First Web Applications
Before Spring MVC, before Struts matured, you were writing JSP by hand:
<%@ page import="java.sql.*" %>
<html>
<body>
<%
Connection conn = null;
Statement stmt = null;
ResultSet rs = null;
try {
Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");
conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost/mydb", "user", "pass");
stmt = conn.createStatement();
rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT * FROM users");
while(rs.next()) {
out.println("<p>" + rs.getString("name") + "</p>");
}
} catch(Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
if(rs != null) rs.close();
if(stmt != null) stmt.close();
if(conn != null) conn.close();
}
%>
</body>
</html>
Was it elegant? Not by today's standards. But you shipped working web applications when most people were still figuring out CGI scripts. You learned about separation of concerns by experiencing what happens when you don't have it. That's invaluable education.
The Performance Battle: You Proved the Skeptics Wrong
Early Java was slow, and you heard about it constantly.
- Startup times measured in seconds
- Memory usage that made C++ developers scoff
- Garbage collection pauses at the worst moments
- "Java is too slow for real applications"—you heard this at every meeting
But you didn't give up. You profiled. You optimized. You learned the HotSpot JVM inside and out when it arrived in 1999. You proved, deployment by deployment, that Java could scale.
When people say Java is fast today, they're building on the performance work you did and the battles you fought.
You Built Without Modern Conveniences
Today's Java developers have it easy because you paved the way:
Generics: You worked without them until Java 5 (2004). You cast everything:
ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
list.add("Hello");
String s = (String) list.get(0); // You kept track of types in your head
And when you got it wrong, you found out at runtime. You learned defensive programming the hard way.
Autoboxing: You manually converted between primitives and objects for years:
Integer i = new Integer(42);
int value = i.intValue();
Every. Single. Time.
Annotations: Before Java 5 (2004), you wrote XML configuration. Mountains of it. You became expert at debugging XML schemas and deployment descriptors.
Lambdas: Until Java 8 (2014), you wrote anonymous inner classes:
button.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
System.out.println("Clicked!");
}
});
You understood closures and functional programming before the syntax made it obvious.
Streams API: Before Java 8 (2014), you wrote loops. Nested loops. Loops over loops. You were incredibly proficient at them.
Var Keyword: Until Java 10 (2018), you typed out every single type declaration. You knew your types intimately.
The Build Tool Evolution: You Were There
Ant (2000) was your revolution. You migrated from Makefiles and custom shell scripts to XML-based builds:
<project name="MyProject" default="compile">
<target name="compile">
<javac srcdir="src" destdir="build/classes"/>
</target>
<target name="jar" depends="compile">
<jar destfile="myapp.jar" basedir="build/classes"/>
</target>
</project>
Maven arrived in 2004 with promises of dependency management. You were the early adopters who figured out the POM, dealt with repository issues, and convinced your teams to adopt it.
Gradle wouldn't show up until 2012—you'd already been managing builds for over a decade by then.
The Community You Built
You created the Java community that still thrives today:
- Java Ranch (now CodeRanch): You answered questions and helped newcomers
- TheServerSide.com: You shared your J2EE war stories
- Java Lobby: You debated best practices and new releases
- comp.lang.java newsgroups: You participated in Usenet discussions
- JavaOne conferences: You made the annual pilgrimage to San Francisco, networked, and brought back knowledge to your teams
- Books: You bought and read physical books. "Effective Java" (2001) is still on your shelf, pages worn from use
You didn't just consume knowledge—you shared it freely and built a culture of learning.
What You Gave Us
You experienced challenges that taught you lessons we all benefit from:
- The excitement: You were at the forefront of a revolution
- Career foundation: The skills you built then still matter today
- Community spirit: You created the collaborative culture Java is known for
- Hard-won wisdom: You learned patterns and anti-patterns by living them
- The vision: You believed in something bigger and made it happen
Your Legacy Lives On
You shaped modern software development in ways that can't be overstated:
- You proved managed languages could be fast enough for anything
- You brought object-oriented programming to the enterprise mainstream
- You established patterns and practices we still teach today
- You built an ecosystem that's still thriving decades later
- You showed that open-source communities could build world-class tools
Modern Java—with its records, pattern matching, var, sealed classes, and virtual threads—stands on the foundation you built. The JVM is blazingly fast because you pushed it to be. The tooling is phenomenal because you demanded better. Spring Boot makes web development enjoyable because you endured the pain that led to its creation.
Thank You
To everyone who wrote Java before generics existed: You have my immense respect and admiration.
You cast all those collections without type safety. You wrote new Integer(42) thousands of times. You debugged ClassCastExceptions at 2 AM. You convinced management to download the JRE. You waited for applets to load. You wrestled with EJB deployment descriptors. You typed every getter, every setter, every anonymous inner class.
You're not just developers—you're pioneers. You built the bridges we walk across today.
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