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?"

Comments

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.