"Bias" disclosure: I've been writing a *lot* of iPhone code lately, and it's the most interesting coding I've done since learning Java in 1996.
On Jan 22, 3:57 pm, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote: > What makes the current situation hard to take for Mac using Java > programmers is the lack of communication from Apple on the subject. > > I wonder why Apple doesn't just have a Java dev team blog or similar? Can you think of any other Mac or iPhone team in Apple that blogs or otherwise has a public face? The only example I can think of is the WebKit guys, and that's an open source project. For Apple's own stuff, the corporate culture is one of "Apple does not talk about unannounced products" (their stock PR line anytime they're asked about stuff). That's just how they are. Does it make it hard to make plans based on what they're going to do? Yep. Does it also suck when more open companies pre-announce stuff that you base your plans on, only to have those announcements turn into nothing? That sucks too. Planning for the future is imprecise, difficult, and loaded with hazards... and always has been. 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. Sorry to be blunt, but this is asinine, and this kind of conspiratorial talk reflects poorly on the Java community. Java is not being kept down by The Man and his nefarious plan to force everyone to use Objective-C. For one thing, Ruby and Python are first-class languages for Cocoa programming on the Mac as of OS X 10.5. What's keeping Java behind on the Mac is self-interest: Apple has been a Sun licensee for over 10 years, has thrown many engineer hours into their own VM, and it's really hard to say what they have to show for it, other than WebObjects, which they use for their own enterprise apps, like the iTunes Store. But they're not real big in servers, and probably never will be. As far as the desktop goes, it's not like there's an immense amount of end-user Java software out there that the Mac has to stay compatible with. Heck, user-facing Flash outnumbers Java by many orders of magnitude, and yet Apple was able to sell tens of millions of iPhones with a full-featured web browser that *doesn't* handle Flash. Do you think there's anyone who wouldn't buy a Mac or an iPhone just because it didn't support Java (or in the case of the Mac, the newest version of Java)? Of course there is: Java developers wouldn't. But that's the only voice we ever hear in these arguments. In the big picture of everyday users, there's very little value in desktop Java, because there just aren't that many really important apps and applets that require it. Apple isn't a big company: its employment figures are bloated by the fact that it runs all those stores. I've come to wonder if the big delays getting Java 6 out last year had something to do with the iPhone, as it seems they pulled nearly all their engineers into the push to get iPhone 2.0 out the door. I had a tech support request go unanswered for months, and found out last summer it was because they'd pulled all the developer support engineers full time into the iPhone push for months on end. So maybe Java's just a very low priority for its engineering staff. When the only people who use it are the ones hurling facile insults at the company (I'm going to smack the next person who makes a crack about "eye candy") from the confines of their own little world, I can understand why that might be the case. --Chris --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
