Re: Learning Cocoa (OT!: Small Language Rant)
Re: Learning Cocoa (OT!: Small Language Rant)
- Subject: Re: Learning Cocoa (OT!: Small Language Rant)
- From: "Clark S. Cox III" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 20:34:14 -0400
On Monday, July 16, 2001, at 09:37 , Tyler LaGrange wrote:
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.
I would have no problem recommending that someone use Java for
Cocoa apps, if it weren't for the larger memory footprint, and slowdown
caused by the VM. Unless we get a Java that is compiled directly to
machine code (not Java byte code), this difference will never go away.
Take any Cocoa app written in Java, and re-write it in Obj-C, and you
will get a faster, smaller, and less-resource intensive app.