A brief history of Java GUIs
The first user interfaces in personal computers mimicked the terminals of mainframes or minicomputers. Apple introduced the Mac in 1984 and Microsoft introduced Windows a year later. Yet, most personal computers sold in the 1980s had terminal interfaces. What changed everything was the general availability of the internet and the creation of the technology behind the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee, starting in 1989. By the end of the 20th century, we expected the computers we used to have a GUI. In Chapter 15, Jakarta Faces Application, we will look at web programming in Java, while in this chapter, we will look at desktop GUI programming.
When Java was introduced in 1995, its original purpose was the creation of applets, small programs that run from web pages inside a web browser. These pages delivered compiled applets that ran in the JVM rather than in the browser. JavaScript, also developed around the same time, ran inside the browser. This led...
