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From the News Desk
Wednesday, 24. January 2007
Java Not the Apple of Steve Jobs' Eye
Steve Jobs' comments on Java have stirred a hornet’s nest. After the launch of Apple’s much awaited mobile phone iPhone in January 2007, Jobs said "Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain..." This sudden turnaround by Apple—once a deep supporter of Java—has made the supporter and the developer angry.
But Apple was not averse to Java a decade ago. Daniel H. Steinberg recollects Steve Jobs' statement at the JavaOne Keynote address in 2000: “We want to bring Java back to the desktop in a really big way. I’m here today to personally tell you we are working hard to make Mac the best Java delivery vehicle on the planet. The biggest thing we are doing is we are going to bundle Java 2 SE into every single copy of Mac OS X that we ship later on this year.” WebObjects was written in Java and a bridge to Java was added to Cocoa. Now, the Cocoa-Java bridge is outdated and the Java version of WebObjects powers the iTunes Music Store. It is a different story in 2007. Apple, while being comfortable with server side Java, doesn't want to accept it on the desktop.
In a Newsweek interview, Steve Jobs said, "You don’t want your phone to be an open platform. You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." While the Java platform is supported by a variety of phones, it is not the native platform for any of them. Java phone apps are tuned towards a minimal subset of buttons, or towards a stylus that the iPhone doesn't have.
Mixed Reactions
There are mixed reactions to Steve Jobs’ comments within the community. The statements made by Steve Jobs have been analysed in a number of ways.Duncan Davidson points out that there aren’t that many compelling desktop end user Java applications. Most of the desktop applications for the Mac are written in C, Objective-C, and C++ using different frameworks.
Ed Burnette says that managed applications in Java or .Net are inherently safer than unmanaged applications. Unmanaged applications, written in languages like C++ or Objective C (the standard OSX programming language), are closer to the hardware and can suffer from problems like wild pointers, buffer overruns, and incorrectly using deallocated memory. Managed applications don't have pointers and leave memory management to the virtual machine they run in.
They also have the advantage of being compiled once into a portable intermediate representation (bytecode) that can be run on any hardware architecture. C/C++ applications must be built separately for every architecture you want to support. Ironically, this flexibility doesn't necessarily come with a performance penalty; real world studies have shown that managed applications run as fast or faster than unmanaged applications in most cases.
iPhone’s Performance in the Market
Since the iPhone does not sport Java, it lacks a number of cool Java-powered applications and mobile games. Users have questioned the ability of the iPhone to satisfy the average teenager’s craze for mobile games. According to Sun Microsystems, Java technology is used in over four billion devices worldwide. Java powered mobile games are the killer applications available in almost every mobile phone. The absence of Java in the iPhone would, then, affect its performance in the market.
The iPhone runs on a trimmed down version of Mac OS X. The number of developers working on Mac OS X Platform is less compared to the number of developers who work on the Java platform. Moreover, the market demand for OS X applications is poor. iPhone’s market performance will be clear only when it steps into the market. There are opinions that though technology geeks wouldn’t mind the absence of Java powered applications in spite of the high price, teenagers who attach greater importance to applications like mobile games wouldn’t take a fancy to it.
But Apple was not averse to Java a decade ago. Daniel H. Steinberg recollects Steve Jobs' statement at the JavaOne Keynote address in 2000: “We want to bring Java back to the desktop in a really big way. I’m here today to personally tell you we are working hard to make Mac the best Java delivery vehicle on the planet. The biggest thing we are doing is we are going to bundle Java 2 SE into every single copy of Mac OS X that we ship later on this year.” WebObjects was written in Java and a bridge to Java was added to Cocoa. Now, the Cocoa-Java bridge is outdated and the Java version of WebObjects powers the iTunes Music Store. It is a different story in 2007. Apple, while being comfortable with server side Java, doesn't want to accept it on the desktop.
In a Newsweek interview, Steve Jobs said, "You don’t want your phone to be an open platform. You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." While the Java platform is supported by a variety of phones, it is not the native platform for any of them. Java phone apps are tuned towards a minimal subset of buttons, or towards a stylus that the iPhone doesn't have.
Mixed Reactions
There are mixed reactions to Steve Jobs’ comments within the community. The statements made by Steve Jobs have been analysed in a number of ways.Duncan Davidson points out that there aren’t that many compelling desktop end user Java applications. Most of the desktop applications for the Mac are written in C, Objective-C, and C++ using different frameworks.
Ed Burnette says that managed applications in Java or .Net are inherently safer than unmanaged applications. Unmanaged applications, written in languages like C++ or Objective C (the standard OSX programming language), are closer to the hardware and can suffer from problems like wild pointers, buffer overruns, and incorrectly using deallocated memory. Managed applications don't have pointers and leave memory management to the virtual machine they run in.
They also have the advantage of being compiled once into a portable intermediate representation (bytecode) that can be run on any hardware architecture. C/C++ applications must be built separately for every architecture you want to support. Ironically, this flexibility doesn't necessarily come with a performance penalty; real world studies have shown that managed applications run as fast or faster than unmanaged applications in most cases.
iPhone’s Performance in the Market
Since the iPhone does not sport Java, it lacks a number of cool Java-powered applications and mobile games. Users have questioned the ability of the iPhone to satisfy the average teenager’s craze for mobile games. According to Sun Microsystems, Java technology is used in over four billion devices worldwide. Java powered mobile games are the killer applications available in almost every mobile phone. The absence of Java in the iPhone would, then, affect its performance in the market.
The iPhone runs on a trimmed down version of Mac OS X. The number of developers working on Mac OS X Platform is less compared to the number of developers who work on the Java platform. Moreover, the market demand for OS X applications is poor. iPhone’s market performance will be clear only when it steps into the market. There are opinions that though technology geeks wouldn’t mind the absence of Java powered applications in spite of the high price, teenagers who attach greater importance to applications like mobile games wouldn’t take a fancy to it.
