Shawn Erickson hit the nail on the head when he wrote
We have the tools to do such bridging ourselves (JNI). To me it sounds
like a prefect opportunity for the community to develop and maintain
Java objects that wrap/expose core Mac OS X APIs... perfect use of an
open source project.
So to point this discussion in a new direction, and respect Alan's
request that we stick to technical issues rather than wishes for what we'd
like Apple to do, is anyone interested in trying to actually help create
such a project?
I don't know Objective-C, and have never done any Cocoa programming,
so I can't offer much assistance. But I do have some views on what would
be useful.
The viewpoint which says, "Objective-C is the best language for
writing Mac-only applications, and if you're writing in Java, you probably
want to be cross platform," has been repeated many times by many people.
For the most part, I think this is true, but it's not the whole story. I
write cross platform Java applications. I'm not interested in limiting my
potential user base to a single platform, but I'm still willing to put in
some work to make my applications integrate well with each platform they
run on. Apple demonstrated some really cool technologies at WWDC, and I'd
love to make my cross platform Java applications integrate with them when
running on OS X - Spotlight, Time Machine, iChat Theater, etc.
So I don't care about writing full Cocoa applications in Java, but I
would like something that allows me to easily access some Cocoa-based
frameworks from Java. That could be a set of Java wrappers for popular
frameworks, or it could be a generic tool for invoking Cocoa from Java.
It's been said that Java isn't sufficiently dynamic to support Cocoa well,
but there are ways of dealing with that. For example, I wouldn't mind a
reflection-like API where you use a String to specify what function to
invoke. That would be inconvenient and inefficient if you were basing
your entire application on it, but for the small, self contained uses I
have in mind, it would work fine.
So is anyone else interested in trying to start an open source
project to do this?
Peter
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