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Re: Apple should get behind Cocoa Java

On 17/08/2006, at 10:55 AM, Scott Ellsworth wrote:


On Aug 16, 2006, at 5:43 PM, Ian Joyner wrote:

On 17/08/2006, at 10:33 AM, Shawn Erickson wrote:

On 8/16/06, Ian Joyner <email@hidden> wrote:

I agree that suggesting to companies that they retrain their
developers in Objective-C is a bit much because it is only used for
Cocoa applications

If you are going to do any Cocoa development (or related frameworks)
learning Objective-C/C++ is trivial compared to learning the Cocoa
APIs and related programming patterns/paradigms. Seriously in all the
groups that I have worked with, who started to do Cocoa development,
learning Objective-C was the least of the ramp up time involved (often
the Java folks pick it up the fastest in my experience).

Sure, but try suggesting that to a company, especially since Objective-C is a single-platform language. I agree learning Cocoa is huge compared to Objective-C, but my suggestion is that the business world is looking for a more gentle transition to the OS X world, like wheel in the box and it just works.

Thing is, if they are doing Cocoa, they are already doing a single platform system.

I think that probably is very succinctly the reason that Apple isn't bothering to progress Java for Cocoa, and is probably the answer to Vince's original post. For Cocoa developers, there is probably no reason to use Java instead of Objective-C. But for non-Cocoa developments, the implication of which is cross-platform, this is where Java comes in. I'd like to see more support for other languages on top of Cocoa. I have been involved in such an effort, so can say that a natively compiled language can work well with Cocoa, but I think in contrast Java has to get out of its sandbox with JNI and Java-Cocoa bridge technologies which aren't so simple and obviously make it hard to keep up.

The overhead of having to pick up objective C, python, or ruby is pretty small compared to the overhead of learning the quite massive Cocoa APIs.

Apple does provide a C api, called Carbon. I am not that fond of it, but many developers are.

I did a MacApp-style framework for Carbon as well before I did Cocoa. Certainly Cocoa has all the event handling stuff in it that I had to do in the Carbon framework.

I do think Apple should provide java apis for more of their stuff, but I kinda agree that Cocoa/Java was not a happening thing. (In other words, exposing auth services with a Java API would do me more real good than exposing the entire Cocoa API in a half-assed way.) I suggest that if you agree about specific APIs, file bugs asking for the exact API you want. Might never happen, but then again...

I think Apple has probably got it right for Java for the above reasons. But I don't think these reasons necessarily apply to other language support. The reason is that (like Java) it is good for your developers to be working with languages that they can use on other platforms, even if it is not doing Cocoa stuff.

Ian

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References: 
 >Apple should get behind Cocoa Java (From: Vince Marco <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Apple should get behind Cocoa Java (From: Ian Joyner <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Re: Apple should get behind Cocoa Java (From: "Shawn Erickson" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Apple should get behind Cocoa Java (From: Ian Joyner <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Apple should get behind Cocoa Java (From: Scott Ellsworth <email@hidden>)



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