Well not reaaally.. the language concept is amazing. Write some code that'll work on any computer? And you can make applets too? so it'll work on the web or as an application? It sounds like it comes out of a magical fairy tail.
I found this extremely intriguing. The fact that it's made to be a little more idiot proof with it's lack of pointers didn't really mean much to me, but it's also written to force you to be more OO conscious. which is cool too since i had trouble with it in some C++ Class. Now i'm taking Data Structures and i believe learning java was a great thing to do before jumping into it.
Buuut there's some major problems. As there has been a heated battle between java applets and Flash for quite some time.. Well it was recently.. maybe 5 years ago before java applets started getting neglected. Now Flash has apparently won this battle, And what great Strides Flash has made.
Although people still carry on making Java applets.. well Notch made the extremely famous "Minecraft" which can be played in an applet.. and then there's Runescape.. And that's about it.
But applets are about to take a pretty big hit with mozilla recently deciding to stop allowing java to be used in Firefox because of certain security issues.. This doesn't bode well for Java on the web especially considering about 30% of users on the internet use Firefox.
Now consider the fact that i believe it's every(?) just in time compiler for java is written in C++. And if you want to use spiffy new libraries written to make your life easier. you'll need to use native libraries anyway. Killing that great portability that java is known for. Plus it has that stigma of being slow which i don't believe is necessarily true. But it's got a lot working against it.
Honestly i've recently grown fed up with it. And for good Reason!!! Now as i understand it, there's great applications for server side crap that i've never gotten into. So i'm not saying this is a useless language, but i don't think it's for me. Not now anyway, it has a really cool concept behind it but i think Flash/C++ just might be the way to go.
Think my next step will be flash, i haven't decided whether Canon Attack will recieve any more attention. If it does it'll just be for death animations or something similar. I'd like to create something that i feel can go somewhere. or be shared.. or maybe i'll just put it on newgrounds. But i'd like to share. And with the kind of support Java is getting right now i just don't see that being a feasible direction to go in. Especially since i haven't sunk Enormous amounts of my time into it yet.
Well a good chunk of time has been spent, but who knows it may be useful at some point?
