I love building web servers in Java. The language is great, the tools are great, the libraries are great. It rocks.

But good LORD why do people continue to insist on building desktop programs in Java? The most recent version of the JRE now appears to launch this "Java Starting" window while it slowly does god knows what. And I must admit, this is the best-styled and slickest "please wait" window I've ever seen.

But you know what's better than a really slick window to let you know that Java is starting? How about a program that just starts quickly and doesn't need to tell you to wait? This dialog was on the screen for so long that I had time to come up with the premise for this blog entry, screenshot the dialog, and start editing in photoshop.

This dialog box is actually from a Sun application. And I imagine that somebody at Sun thinks it's good PR for Java to have the language waved in my face every time I use this program. But really, all this says is "This hideously slow piece of shit brought to you by Java!" Its not really good advertising.