Re: Cocoa and standard Java
Re: Cocoa and standard Java
- Subject: Re: Cocoa and standard Java
- From: mathew <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2003 13:12:13 -0500
On Thursday, Mar 13, 2003, at 22:42 US/Eastern, Phillip McKerrow wrote:
Is it possible to build interfaces for Java applications that use awt
or swing with Interface builder?
No. Interface Builder is for building Cocoa interfaces.
Apple claim to be committed to standards, so I reasoned that their
software tools may reflect that commitment.
They do. You can compile Java applications that use Swing or AWT just
like you would on any other Java-supporting platform. You can even
build and deploy J2EE applications using nothing but the developer kit
and open source Java code.
Apple have not built a tool for constructing Swing or AWT interfaces.
That's not part of the standard JDK. If you want such a tool, there are
plenty out there that should run on OS X, since they're generally build
in Java.
I built a simple Cocoa for Java application to investigate. What I
found is that even simple things like text fields are different.
Well, of course. The Cocoa API is completely different to Swing and AWT.
I could be wrong, but Cocoa Java looks like a set of Java calls to C
functions and hence one would have to think like a C programmer to use
them, not like a Java programmer.
Cocoa Java is a Java bridge to the native Cocoa interface objects, just
like SWT is a Java bridge to native interface objects and JDBC is often
used as a bridge to native database APIs. Does that mean you need to
think like a C programmer to use SWT or JDBC?
Even though we are doing some development in Cocoa Java, the option of
teaching the non standard Cocoa Java NS classes is not attractive:
1. students want to learn standard Java as they perceive that it leads
to jobs and so we need to teach them awt and swing
By the same argument, there's no point teaching them to rely on some
non-standard graphical Java UI builder. Teach them to use ant.
mathew
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