Re: Cocoa-Java????
Re: Cocoa-Java????
- Subject: Re: Cocoa-Java????
- From: Jeff LaMarche <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 18:08:49 -0500
On Wednesday, December 4, 2002, at 03:46 PM, Mike Little wrote:
>
I'm returning to the Mac after many years on the dark side and I'm
>
investigating Cocoa. Incidently, it appears that the Mac has changed ;)
Yes, it has, but for the better...
>
I'm an experienced Java developer so I thought I start with Cocoa-Java
>
apps rather than trying to learn Objective-C. However, there seems to
>
be a lack of educated opinions about using Java with Cocoa. I
>
appreciate the loss of cross platform functionality and that in and of
>
itself, this pushes me towards using swing, but using swing, of course,
>
means I'm just developing on a mac, not developing for the mac.
There is certainly no "lack" of "educated" opinions on this - if you
search the group archives you will find many, many educated opinions on
Java Cocoa. It almost seems like you want to assume that because very
few people use or recommend Cocoa/Java that it must be due to some bias
or lack of knowledge; it's not.
Many people on this list are Java programmers as well as being
Cocoa/Objective-C programmers. Java is a wonderful language in many
ways, but Java/Cocoa in my opinion, and in the opinion of many others,
is not a good choice for application development. There's a reason that
there are no books on Cocoa/Java...
Objective-C is not hard to learn - the hard part to learn are the
extensive Cocoa frameworks, which you'll have to learn even if you use
Cocoa/Java. The hardest part for a Java programmer in coming to
Objective-C is to shift mindset from a strongly typed, early-bound
language to a weakly-typed, late-bound language. Java (& C++)
programmers tend to want to subclass all the time - I certainly did
when I was first learning Cocoa - but the syntax is not difficult to
pick up and most programmers really enjoy the experience once they get
into it - there are some very cool things in Objective-C that don't
exist in Java.
Remember that he underlying design patterns reflect the nature of the
objective-C language, and much of the way you have to do things in
Cocoa/Java seems a little strange because they had to contort the
design patterns to work for Java.
Learning Cocoa/Objective-C for an experienced Java programmer is only
slightly more time-consuming than learning Java/Cocoa, and you'll find
it a much more pleasant experience and you'll find a lot more resources
to help you. I found that learning Objective-C has made me a better
Java programmer not in a small part because Java's design was heavily
influenced by NextStep. It's also interesting to see how similar
problems are solved in different languages.
>
So, any and all opinions about Cocoa-Java would be appreciated.
My recommendation here is: don't. If you want to learn Cocoa, learn
Objective-C so you can take full advantage of Cocoa. If you're intent
on sticking to Java, program in pure Java and gain the full benefits of
the language. Java-Cocoa is, at best, a compromise.
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