Re: NO future for Cocoa-Java ?
Re: NO future for Cocoa-Java ?
- Subject: Re: NO future for Cocoa-Java ?
- From: Bob Ippolito <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 23:54:48 -1000
On Jul 7, 2005, at 11:00 PM, Yvon Thoraval wrote:
Following XCode documentation latest's update i've seen that :
- apple advise to switch from java to Obj-C ;
Everyone else has been advising that since the beginning!
I'm not really sure why anyone ever trusted it. Apple never really
used it much themselves (publicly, anyway), so they don't have any
internal pressures to keep it functional.
- no more bindings from java to cocoa interfaces after 10.4.
the seems to be linked to apple's switch to Intel proc ...
I highly doubt that it has anything at all to do with that. It's
been languishing for a long time, they might as well put it out of
its misery.
does that means that Cocoa-Java, never been really alive, i dead ?
Cocoa-Java has never really worked quite right, and the way they
decided to implement it was a massive burden on their developers.
Basically, Apple made several huge mistakes. The Cocoa-Java bridge
requires:
- Mappings from every single Objective-C selector to some Java method
- A completely separate set of documentation
- Separate tests to make sure they didn't screw up anything in the
mapping (I'm not convinced these ever really existed, but proper
maintenance would've required them)
This is obviously way too much work for little benefit. It *might*
been worth it if a lot of people were using the Java bridge, but
they're not. The Cocoa-Java bridge has never been reliable nor
complete.
Apple was never eating their own dog food with the Cocoa-Java bridge,
despite the fact it's been available for years. There aren't any
Apple applications that I'm aware of that use the Java bridge for
anything, other than the maybe some WebObjects dev tools and possibly
little bits of Xcode, so the Java-Cocoa bridge only really *has* to
work well enough to support that. If the Cocoa-Java bridge was
really a worthwhile technology, Apple would've shipped a product or
two that used it in the past 5 years.
Fortunately, other bridges have taken a different and sane approach,
giving a 1:1 mapping between Objective C to/from the target
language. Apple's Cocoa-Java bridge is actually the only one that
does things the wrong way. Many of these bridges have real
applications written in them and are an active target platform for
new applications, so their maintenance is guaranteed (the open source
bridges, anyway).
There's no reason a third party couldn't develop a Cocoa-Java bridge
that was done in a sane way, people have already done it for many
other langauges (Python, Ruby, Perl, LISP, SmallTalk, etc.). Many of
these are open source, so if someone wanted to develop a Cocoa-Java
bridge that worked, they wouldn't have to look much farther than the
PyObjC source code (the most functional and stable bridge) to see
what's necessary to do it correctly.
-bob
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