On Jan 22, 4:14 pm, Michael Kimsal <[email protected]> wrote:
> The cynical part of me (and others I've talked to) seems to indicate that
> Java is a threat to the Objective-C approach Apple wants everyone to take.
> The more people can write portable stuff on a Mac, the less tied to a Mac
> they'll be.  To the extent this is true, I don't see one whit of attitudinal
> difference between Apple's approach to Java and Microsoft's all those years
> ago.
>

I do.  Microsoft effectively wanted to 'fork' the Java language,
adding their own proprietary and hence incompatible extensions into it
so that native Win32/COM calls could be made more easily without
requiring individual JNI interfaces to be created.

I don't see Apple trying to incompatibly fork the language.

> Why Sun has ceded the writing of Java for the Mac platform *to* Apple is
> still a mystery to me, and probably always will be.  Since Sun has
> historically given Java short shrift on Linux, *new* Java releases still
> have tended to be a single platform affair.
>

Is that really true? Doesn't JDK1.6_10 run on Linux already? I think
you might be a bit out of date, or perhaps I'm not aware of the
deficiencies in the most current JDK releases on Linux?

As to why Sun ceded JDK ports to Apple, I'm guessing the reason is
simply one of resources.  The Java platform has always had interfaces
to the lower level graphics bits of Windows and UNIX since its
inception, so adding new features and evolving the language wouldn't
seem to be a major effort for Linux.

However, an OSX port is a different story, mostly because as you said
above  the Cocoa/ObjectiveC/Aqua based environment is a fairly radical
paradigm shift from either Linux/X11 or Win32/GDI.

-Chris

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