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    Apple dropping the Java Cocoa Bridge?

    Jul 11, 11:27 AM

    Sometimes I wish when apple takes something away, they would give a clearer idea of what they are thinking. Case in point, I am really hoping that Apple has some sort of alternative in mind here and is not just dumping on Java’s parade when they say, Features added to Cocoa in Mac OS X versions later than 10.4 will not be added to the Cocoa-Java programming interface.

    Huh? Really? I mean, Java programmers don’t want to learn Objective C… and didn’t Apple drop the Objective C interface to the newly free-as-in-beer WebObjects in favor of Java?

    Apple has historically put Java and Cocoa together as 2 of the 3 pillars of the Apple framework stack. At the last developer convention, they pushed XCode 2.0 as the way to develop apps for the mac in the future, gunning for Codewarrior users. I really couldn’t figure out why they were going after other IDE’s other than to boost their own XCode’s market position, but I really thought that their overtures that Java “just works” were sort of a subtle nod to Java as a fully supported platform.

    The thing is that XCode’s Java support is really piss poor when compared against Eclipse or even Net Beans (so I’m told). And while Apple may be able to compete with a development environment that costs hundreds of dollars, I think they will only drive Eclipse users away from macs. Lots of people want to be able to use Apple kit to develop for non-apple systems. If Apple would drop a few more developers into the Eclipse foundation, perhaps they could get a little more respect from the Java community.

    The only positive spin I could see from this is that perhaps they are recognizing the Eclipse/SWT platform’s momentum and are deciding not to compete there. They have already written an article about Eclipse and OSX, and Eclipse’s SWT library uses Carbon (not cocoa) so it wont be harmed by Apple’s decision here. Perhaps this is a sign of an impending rise of Eclipse’s status on OSX?

    So In the end, I’m really going to hope that this is not a sign that Apple is moving away from Java… as much as “you should develop Cocoa applications using Objective-C to take advantage of existing and upcoming Cocoa features” makes me think otherwise.


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