Re: Learning Cocoa (OT!: Small Language Rant)
Re: Learning Cocoa (OT!: Small Language Rant)
- Subject: Re: Learning Cocoa (OT!: Small Language Rant)
- From: Tyler LaGrange <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 21:37:49 -0400
Brilliant! You took the words right out of my mouth. I had marked
Andre's message as the one message in this thread that made me mad
enough to want to respond to - and then I got to this one - which beat
me to it.
When I first got on this list I tried to sway somebody to use Java
instead of ObjC - and there were SO many people that bashed me. Now it
seems as if in less than 2 months this list has gone from mostly ObjC
die-hards to a 50-50 blend of Java and ObjC people. I have to think
that eventually the Java people on this list will outweigh the ObjC guys
at this rate. I would almost like to say that this needs a list of it's
own - an email@hidden set up. This really isn't
as off Topic as it seems though. I am sure that there are apple guys
reading this list (probably getting paid to do so - haha) and that they
note what happens in these discussions. ObjC people need to stay
supportive. And java people need to emphasize that this whole idea of
giving us an easy way in to Cocoa is a good idea. It will help
determine where apple will spend it's resources - adding more features
to the ObjC side - or catching the Java side up.
I have to think that the Java support will definitely improve as fast as
possible. WebObjects 5 seems to be going in the correct direction!
There won't be any real benefits to using ObjC or Java. The real
benefits offered here are in the Cocoa API and the services it
provides. OSX rocks. Cocoa is really nice. The java bridge is great
and will only get better.
Java is NOT just for making portable apps. It is SO easy to write all
your business logic and data components in Java which can be reused in
MANY MANY MANY places - such as in an applet - or in an Oracle
database - or in WebObjects 5. But why I choose it here is because the
interfaces from Cocoa are much cooler than Swing (but at Swing is WAY
better than the original awt stuff - yuk!). In the past 3 months I have
taken a lot of my old Java code and made several cool applications that
look and act MUCH better on OSX with Cocoa than through any other
interface on any other platform. I wrote a simple client-server Chat
application - a simple image viewer - an XML/XSL formatter - a Flash 5
server - all in my evening time (i code Enterprise java web stuff during
the day) - just to mess around. It would have taken me SO much longer
to do this in ObjectiveC (and I THINK the XSL app would be darn near
impossible).
Honestly - ObjC isn't that tough to learn - and there really are some
good points (I absolutely hate the memory management stuff though -
blech). But Java just seems so much more logical to stick with - for
myself and many others out there. It's not cause we can't learn ObjC -
or that we feel like old NeXT programmers when we see it - but because
it is easier for us. I'd probably even learn SmallTalk or Lisp or
something if it was the only interface in to OSX.
Java is not a Fad. Apple has done a real good job with this. The
documentation needs some work - and there are missing classes. It's not
QUITE 95% there - but it is at least 65% there and only going to get
better. There will be books for Cocoa-Java soon enough.
I do think that too many people take the us vs. them approach with this
whole ObjC / Java war in here. More people have chimed in on this than
any other post out there. There's some poor people with questions that
need to be answered - so get back to it... ( funny how it's always
the ObjectiveC people that know the answers to the tough questions
though.... maybe they are the smart ones :-/ )
Tyler L
On Monday, July 16, 2001, at 07:53 PM, Jonathan Stimmel wrote:
On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 05:48:41PM -0400, Andre John Mas wrote:
This is true, also I believe that if you want to use Java please leave
Cocoa alone and use AWT or Swing instead. Java was designed to be a
cross platform application environment and linking it with Cocoa,
which is currently MacOS X only, kinda kills the advantages of Java.
I have to disagree with this statement. Yes, you lose a little bit
of cross-platform support, but otoh, how many Mac OS users do you
expect to type "java -jar MyApp.jar" just so you can use Swing? Sure,
you can package it into an a double-clickable OS X app, but doesn't
that action also drop cross platform support?
Just because you use Java with Cocoa doesn't mean that you can't
separate the functional part of your code from the interface. Quite
frankly, those two functions *should* be separate. I started working
on an app that uses cocoa for user interaction, but the core will
remain "pure" Java, so that I (and other developers) can put
alternate, interfaces on it (perhaps Swing, but also interfaces
that swing isn't equipped for, such as a command-line/text version,
or a web application).
Also how many people gripped when Microsoft was adding a Windows only
API to Java?
I don't think you can compare Microsoft with Apple in this case.
From
http://www.sun.com/announcement/letter.html:
Microsoft delivered a product that did not pass the Java
compatibility tests.
This is very different than providing additional APIs (disclaimer:
I did not follow the trial closely...).
My point of view in programming, is that you should use the
best tool for the task at hand.
Agreed.
In this case Java for portability and ObjC to really take advantage of
MacOS X.
I cannot agree with this generalization so long as Apple is committed
to providing the same functionality to both languages. Admittedly, I
haven't done enough Cocoa to see what I may be losing by using Java
instead of Objective C, however the impression I've gotten is that it's
95% there (though it does have the feel of something that was "mapped to"
rather than "designed for" Java).
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