That same trivial application - 15 years later - is still slow.
I'm sorry, but I must conclude that you are either trolling, or that that specific application is really poorly written. I'll admit that I'm no great fan of Java really, but for quite different reasons. I've written quite a few Java programs in recent years, and performance has been the least of the problems. I have never experienced the click or processing lags of which you speak, and the startup lag is far less than a second, so it is certainly competitive with other GUI programs in that regard (I wouldn't use it to write command-line programs though, of course).
Most recently, I've been writing a MMORPG (as a hobby), where the client is written in Java precisely because that means I can use Java Web Start for dead easy "installations" on users' machines. You just click on a link and it runs. While there are a few (minor) performance problems, I have profiled the program and narrowed it down to certain algorithms, which I know how I could improve if the need would truly arise.
If you doubt me, you can try it (though you'd need to register, but it's an easy registration process). You would get to experience the goodness of Java Web Start, and you'd also see that there are no click or processing lags apart, of course, from those inherent to the Internet latency which is part of running an online game.
The good news is that is also uses a shitload of ram[...]
Be very wary of making that statement if you are not very sure that you know what you're saying. It is certainly true that the process monitor on both Unix and Windows will display Java processes as consuming hundreds of MBs of RAM, but that is because the JRE preallocates virtual memory for its heap. Virtual memory, mind you -- not physical memory. The OS (or at least Windows and Linux) will allocate physical pages to the process on demand, and the PermGen and OldGen heap spaces are compacted by the GC and therefore readily available for swapping out. The JRE interacts quite well with the VM for at least the most common systems.
[...]an average java application programmer is nearly clueless about the OS and hardware they're using.
You are correct, and that is definitely a problem. However, the problem is certainly not limited to Java, and bad programmers are abundant for any programming system you could envisage. I do not think that it is fair to blame that problem on Java.
And finally, full web applications ( we use Zimbra for enterprise messaging) with drag and drop capabilities are better than java applications.
I'd really like to go on a long tirade against "web applications", but I'm not feeling pumped up enough right now. I'll be content with insisting that such applications are violating -- nay, raping! -- the model of the WWW (being hypertext) and making it close to impossible to write a new web browser, the latter of which is a great problem, seeing how all current web browsers suck.
