On Jan 23, 6:48 am, Chris Adamson <[email protected]> wrote:
> "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.
>
This is a very good point, and one I hadn't considered.
> 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.
>
It's always important to take a step back and consider the larger view
on something you want like this. I'd guess that the number of Mac
using Java developers like myself has grown exponentially over the
last few years with more and more Mac laptops in the field, but even
still we represent a ridiculously small fraction of the Mac buying
population.
I wonder if perhaps it would be in Apple's best financial interest to
open source their JDK implementation so that we hobbyists could
contribute, providing the necessary man hours needed to get the latest
JDK running under OSX? If the Java market is truly unimportant to
them, but they want to not lose it entirely, this might seem like a
reasonable way to go.
-Chris P.
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