Apple Freezes Java Support for Cocoa

Nice2Cats writes "A little message on Apple's Developer Connection tells us that Cocoa for Java will get no new features after 10.4. The full text is: 'Features added to Cocoa in Mac OS X versions later than 10.4 will not be added to the Cocoa-Java programming interface. Therefore, you should develop Cocoa applications using Objective-C to take advantage of existing and upcoming Cocoa features.' Is this bad for Java, or bad for Apple, or bad for both, or doesn't anybody give a damn anyway?"

Toolkits

[yasth]

While it may not seem like such a big deal it complicates crossplatform toolkits, and the like. Of course the whole idea of having a "blessed" programming language seems rather old fashioned, and academic.

What does this mean for WebObjects?

[Millennium]

WebObjects 4.5 had support for both Objective-C and Java, if my memory's right. In WebObjects 5.0, support for Objective-C was dropped, because this was during the time when Apple Wanted You To Use Java.

Now, of course, it seems as though Apple Doesn't Want You To Use Java Anymore. Does this mean that WO6 will drop Java support, or at least bring back Objective-C?

This only affects one app that I use...

[Teancom]

Cyberduck. It's the only cocoa-java app that I use, or even know about (not saying there aren't more, just that I don't know about them). Following the cocoa mailing lists, questions about the java bindings are few and far between, which probably lead them to this point. Why dump so much time and effort into a language that your developers aren't using? Either redirect the manpower somewhere else entirely, or into a language like python, which gives your users a meaningful choice - between objc (lowlevel) and python (scripting). And applescript, I guess :-)

Apple has been advising against integration for so

[Hungus]

It has been considered best practice by Apple for some time to not use cocoa with java. Typically when someone has done this it has been for the GUI so that native widgets are accessible but with the Aqua widgets being accessible through Swing there is really no need for it now. If the argument is for cross platform writing of Java apps then pure java is always going to be more portable than Java + native elements.

What about SWT?

[chroot_james]

I wonder how this effects swt or if swt can provide similar functionality to java-cocoa?

Re:Toolkits

[Frumious Wombat]

Actually, this seems to be halfway to the Right Thing; you get rid of a non-portable extension to Java (good), but encourage people to use a minor (though clean) language for native-mode programming (iffy).

I've always wondered why that piece of NeXT heritage stuck around, as I'd be willing to wager a doughnut (pick your favorite pusher) that there are more Ada-programmers around than Objective-C gurus. (translation: take a deep breath, wave goodbye, and move to C++ or whatever the modern alternative compiled language would be, or at least make sure the library interfaces are correct for both languages).

Actually, I'd be just as happy, since they have the entire GNU compiler collection, is to simply define a uniform calling convention for their libraries from all languages, and stop worrying abou the One True Language. DEC did it back in the 80s with the Common Language Interface, which allowed me to call the same function (with pretty much the same syntax) from Fortran, C, or Pascal. I presume today that would mean using SWIG to generate a common set of wrappers, and remembering that there are Fortran, Ada, and C++ programmers out there somewhere when generating them.

Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but it seemed simpler to call those functions than on Unix systems where I always have to worry about the library interface on a language by language basis (one underscore or two; case-sensitive or not, etc.) I would like that level of transparency back.

Re:C++ is not a replacement

[1010011010]

Objective-C coders don't use the language grudgingly.

Since learning Objective-C, it's become my favorite C-type language. It's not something I have to use, it's something I like to use.

Re:C++ is not a replacement

[entrylevel]

I find it hard to believe you speak from experience. Did you write a program or did you just read some source code and figure some things out yourself? How long did you try at it? There's a lot to Objective-C, and being a superset of C is something I never saw as a detriment.

IMHO, it's far more elegant than C#, VB, or Java, used by millions (and loved by less). Certainly moreso than C or C++. It's not as elegant as Python, but few things are.

Most Objective-C programmers love the language a great deal and tend to be (at least on the Mac side) very vocal about it.

Re:History reconstructed (maybe)

[metamatic]

When I interviewed at Apple in 97, the party line was that Java was going to replace Objective C as the standard language for accessing the NeXTSTEP APIs.

Yeah, well, it's worth remembering that back in 1997, Netscape's new browser was going to be written in Java, Corel were going to sell an office suite written in Java, and everyone was going to run 'thin client' systems based on Java. The great Java hype machine was just winding down.

I you decided to use Java for your Cocoa apps...

[5plicer]

you should have listened to Aaron Hillegass [bignerdranch.com] IMO :p

Re:C++ is not a replacement

[jiushao]

Python elegant? That's just ridicolous. Python is a huge and complex lanuage. It has ridicolously many language features, with a bunch new ones added with each release. All with only little planning and thought. It happens to end up being fairly powerful, and of course extremely featureful, but absolutely not elegant.

C# and Java are both clearly more elegant designs, as is C really. C++ has a lot of syntax, and rather wacky semantics in parts, but it manages a lot of power with a few very important concepts (templates). Overall, in elegance I would probably rate Python second to last of the languages listed (VB is extremely unelegant). This does not mean that it is a bad language (though I personally don't care for it), it is powerful and featureful, but it pays for it by being a huge language.