It was a cool idea, and it's still a good way to implement Java
extensions on the Mac versus using JNI, but alas it was an
experiment that pretty much failed.
So you need developers interested in doing specific OS X things with
java that the Cocoa API's give you. You need access as complete as
what any other language will give you. It has to be easier and more
convenient than JNI. You need it to not be a huge ongoing development
and maintenance effort. Given people and a interface satisfying all
of those conditions I think it would be viable.
That was why my thought was a tool that would basically rip the glue
for the API from the header files. If the headers change then you
just re-generate the glue. Given good headers a complete API mapping.
Tuning could be done, maybe applying something like XML patches to
the generation process to say force critical parts of the API to run
on the main thread. No major upkeep but still a fair amount of up
front effort without much point if the developers first mentioned
aren't there for java. More or less what you said I guess.
But the Cocoa API's are across the platform and not just desktop. For
example, you might remember the XGrid client Luca Lutterotti did...
new: XGridClient
There is a cocoa framework for the XGrid API also available that I
tested with a little using JNI. Having a tool to be able to 'rip' a
java API to that framework I would think could be useful. However, I
wouldn't consider that strictly desktop.
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