Sun Is Porting Java To the iPhone

krquet notes an InfoWorld article on Sun's plans for the iPhone. After studying Apple's newly released SDK docs for 24 hours, Sun decided it was feasible to develop a JVM, based on Java Micro Edition, for both the iPhone and the iTouch. An analyst is quoted: "I think going forward, with the SDK, it takes out of Apple's control which applications are 'right' for the iPhone." The article doesn't speculate on how Apple might to react to such a loss of control. "Apple had not shown interest in enabling Java to run on the iPhone, but Sun plans to step in and do the job itself... The free JVM would be made available via Apple's App Store marketplace for third-party applications."

Comments

Loss of Control

[Doomstalk]

What Loss of Control? They've got final right of refusal on everything that goes up, and they hold the only means of distribution. If that's a loss of control, I don't want to know what it'd be like when Apple is totally in control.

The beauty of letting Sun port it

[crovira]

is that Apple is off the hook for anything that fucks up with Java Apps (and Sun knows it so look for very conservative Java apps to get rolled out first.)

That opens up the iPhone (and iPod Touch but who cares about that minority,) for corporate deployment and all those goodies without exposing Apple at all.

In line with Design guidelines?

[aneviltrend]

Here's a short section of the interface design guidelines as released by Apple:

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. It's important to make sure that users do not experience any negative effects because of this reality. In other words, users should not feel that leaving your iPhone application and returning to it later is any more difficult than switching among applications on a computer.

So when the JVM is used by an application, it'll be launched/terminated each time the app is switched to? I'm willing to bet that will make apps that leverage the JVM almost unbearable to use.

Re:Apple's stance

[adrianmonk]

Others have offered reasons why Apple didn't bother with Java (such as wanting to maintain control or not liking its performance), but I think there's a much simpler reason: Apple's products succeed because they are polished. The graphic artists make sure everything looks nice, the UI designers spend time on special touches, and there is a lot of effort that goes into consistency and uniformity.

So, I think Apple didn't bother with Java simply because it didn't fit in with this. They have their own UI, and Java apps either won't look the same or will require a lot of effort to get there. That alone is enough to make Apple say "why bother?" when it already has one language that does the job.

Control

[argent]

If Apple hasn't been proactive in trying to port Java to the iPhone I expect they must have a good reason

Control.

Apple wants to control application access to the iPhone.

I've never been a huge fan of the iPhone, and Apple's continual foot-dragging over opening it up is getting increasingly old.

Re:Not without a private agreement with Apple

[DdJ]

But Sun has Lawyers too, surely they've read the license as well. They wouldn't say they're going to make iPhone-java unless they saw a way to actually do it (albeit, their way to do it may just be to say they're doing it even though they know it's forbidden, and then try to drum up public support if Apple stops them).

Sure, and there's a very easy way for them to do it.

They make the JDK/JVM available only to developers. Then it's essentially just a library that a developer can use. The finished app still needs to go through Apple, and be posted as an individual app. And installing such an app on the iPhone doesn't enable the end-user to install any other apps on the iPhone.

I don't see Apple's terms as forbidding that.

Also, note that if you're a developer, you can install whatever you want on your own iPhone. That $99/year gives you the tools to install apps on your own phone by a mechanism other than the consumer-oriented ones. So, a more conventional JDK/JVM could be made available to developers pretty easily.

And there's also that talk about corporate centralized app-loading. We don't know what the rules for that are going to be, yet.

But it does seem likely that ordinary consumers are not going to be able to load a conventional JVM or Perl interpreter or PalmOS emulator or MAME implementation onto iPhones.

Re:Apple's stance

[samkass]

I can see you're wholly unfamiliar with Java.

The only part of the Java API that is worse than the Apple SDK is the GUI part. If Sun completely threw out Swing and started again from scratch (or Mac Java developers used Rococoa) it would be brilliant. Java's support for everything else-- from multithreading to data structures-- makes Objective-C look like the 30-year-old grampa it is.

And Java is extremely fast-- almost certainly faster than Objective-C, which suffers from the worst of both worlds in performance: static compilation and extremely dynamic linking. These days, dynamic compilation (which has available to it runtime and usage statistics) can optimize much more efficiently than static, leading to higher performance code. And Objective-C's extreme approach to dynamic linking means almost nothing can be inlined or statically optimized across message/function boundaries.

Finally, the iPhone/Touch has some specific hardware to help make Java fast. Apple's just ignoring it. But Java on the iPhone using Apple's GUI library would be extremely cool.

Re:Oh boy! Time for some barely useable ports...

[furball]

On the other hand, having one menu bar for the entire system is the worst UI design decision I've ever seen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts'_law

That "worst" UI design decision results in a menu bar of infinite size which is better for usability than a menu bar of finite size. Poke around the Mac UI and you'll find other examples of Fitt's Law, like how its tree displays work compared to everyone else's.