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Apple Freezes Java Support for Cocoa

Posted by timothy on from the like-a-moolatte dept.

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?"

2 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. What does this mean for WebObjects? by Millennium · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  2. How? by hargettp · · Score: 5, Informative

    Please remember, Java is still supported, it is simply the Cocoa-Java bridge that will no longer be improved. If you are not clear on what the Cocoa-Java bridge is (or event Cocoa), then here is a quick primer: Cocoa is the preferred API for Mac OS X, specifically for applications written in Objective-C. The Cocoa-Java bridge was a similar API that exposed essentially the same object model to Java based applications. As the API was specific to Mac OS X, any application written on top of the Java Cocoa APIs was specific to Mac OS X and thus not portable.

    I would expect the impact to Java developers on OS X to be quite low. Most probably use Swing or SWT for cross-platform support, so the impact of this decision should be negligible.