Java on iPhone

[princec]

Snap Sun decision launches Java at iPhone

OpenGL ES and OpenAL on it too Joy of joys.

Cas

[brackeen]

Good news! I get this feeling they won’t provide iPhone-specific features, though (multi-touch, accelerometer, etc). But good news, nonetheless.

I really think the crown jewel of the iPhone SDK is the App Store. This completely removes any barriers for indie devs to publish games (aside from the $99 dev program) - barriers which exist in the current model where carriers (Verizon, Sprint, etc) control everything.

I wonder how a JVM would work with the App Store? Sun might have to let devs bundle it.

[Mr_Light]

“We of course chose to set the price of the JVM at… free!” Klein told us with a chuckle. Or two. Or more. “Apple explicitly said developers can chose to put free applications through the App Store and - heck - we’re doing it!”

;D

Does this mean sun considers the iphone as a supported platform? 8)

[ORFJackal]

Since the technical requirements for iPhone SDK are “Intel processor-based Mac running Mac OS X Leopard” (http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/) then Java would be the only platform for developing iPhone apps on Windows and Linux.

[woogley]

I was thinking the exact same thing as Jackal… I own a Mac, but all of my coding tools and resources are on my linux box, so it would be really handy to develop iPhone apps on the same box I develop everything else on

@brackeen

Good news! I get this feeling they won’t provide iPhone-specific features, though (multi-touch, accelerometer, etc). But good news, nonetheless.

I don’t see how they can possibly ignore these features… I don’t exactly see the MouseEvent API porting over very nicely

[brackeen]

@woogley

I don’t see how they can possibly ignore these features…

Well I hope you’re right. I assume Sun will do a MIDP implementation, which has a limited pointer API. See: http://java.sun.com/javame/reference/apis/jsr118/javax/microedition/lcdui/Canvas.html#pointerPressed(int,%20int)

I wonder if we’ll see an Android implementation from Google?

[woogley]

Before we all get too excited, one of the commenters from the slashdot article made a good point:

Not without a private agreement with Apple

Section 3.3.2 of the SDK agreement states…

An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any
means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other
frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in
an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-
in interpreter(s).

Now, this is certainly lawyer speak and probably covers more than they’d like - I very doubt they’d care if you used some of your own library code to script custom UI elements in, say, LISP. But it is certainly their intent to stop people from just republishing all the iPhone APIs under a new wrapper, then selling an “Interpreter App” that downloads and runs “jPhone Apps” (aka “data” for your special iPhone app), thereby bypassing all their controls. It certainly seems to rule out a JRE in the sense that we’ve used to, and from Apples point of view, this is correct (no judgements from me on whether this is a good thing or not).

[Abuse]

It’s a neat end to end package, but Apple having a monopoly on the whole thing would scare the crap out of me if I were considering development for the platform.

[admin1]

@woogley

Before we all get too excited, one of the commenters from the slashdot article made a good point:

Without having been in the internal discussions, I would imagine that our lawyers examined this before Sun made an official announcement As for the future of the platform on iPhone, there are a lot of exciting things happening in the Java universe right now and I expect to see more abut this in a couple of months at JavaOne.

[blahblahblahh]

What happened?

I started developing on iPhone this month, and found it a joy to work on - fast, simple, and easy to make great experiences.

The only downside? You’re constrained to a rather nasty programming language that - IMHO - was invented by a language theorist who didn’t plan for anything beyond niche usage (or simply didn’t understand what makes a programming language tick).

It’s essentially C.

With a few hacks, to “simulate” OOP in the barest sense.

That’s a very bad thing. It means “hell” in many ways ;).

Java on iPhone would, quite simply, revoltionise iPhone development. Apple would see a massive increase in the volume of people developing for iPhone (they may be afraid of this - they’ve only just managed to catch up to the demand they already have, which they apparently didn’t see coming) if it used a real programming language - even C++ would be many times better than Objective-C, but something like Java or C# would be exceptionally good.

Incidentally, and intriguingly, the iPhone OS “does not implement” the Objective-C Garbage Collector, so all iPhone coding is done without GC. I do find myself wondering how much easier (and how much better quality?) iPhone devs would find it to have a mature GC-based VM to execute within?

[ewjordan]

@blahblahblahh

Java on iPhone would, quite simply, revoltionise iPhone development. Apple would see a massive increase in the volume of people developing for iPhone (they may be afraid of this - they’ve only just managed to catch up to the demand they already have, which they apparently didn’t see coming) if it used a real programming language - even C++ would be many times better than Objective-C, but something like Java or C# would be exceptionally good.

FWIW, Objective C allows you to code C++ very easily - just use the .mm extension instead of .m. There are a few portability things to watch out for (standard library support on the iPhone proper (the simulator seems to rely on the “normal” OS X standard libraries) is a bit limited), but I’ve found that the mixing is pretty straightforward if you fight through that stuff. Once you’ve got a few wrapper classes to handle the Cocoa Touch stuff you can pretend you’re doing plain old C++ and live a little bit closer to your comfort zone.

[gouessej]

@princec

OpenGL ES and OpenAL on it too Joy of joys.

JOGL 2.0? JOAL?

[zammbi]

Heres the next post: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/10/iphone_jvm_pipe_dream/
Doesn’t look like its going to happen.

[blahblahblahh]

@ewjordan

FWIW, Objective C allows you to code C++ very easily - just use the .mm extension instead of .m.

Yeah, I started doing that.

And then I found a note in the Apple docs stating that, among other problems, “virtual functions are not allowed”.

C++ without virtuals? Oh, joy.

[ewjordan]

@blahblahblahh

And then I found a note in the Apple docs stating that, among other problems, “virtual functions are not allowed”.

I’m pretty sure (though not positive) that only applies to mixing Objective C and C++, where you call C++ code from Objective C; pure C++ code should do fine with virtual functions (I’ve used full C++ libraries with iPhone stuff before, and I doubt many C++ libraries stay away from virtual functions altogether!) even if there is mixing elsewhere in your code.

IMO the cleanest way to do things is to simply pass control off to your pure C++ layer through a wrapper where you deal with all the strange interface issues, then just code “good old” C++ and try to insulate yourself as much as possible from any Objective C mixing.

I agree, it’s kind of a pain, though. Java would be much nicer, though to be honest, I don’t know if I see it happening - Apple has been hostile towards Java lately, not updating the Java interface to Cocoa and whatnot, so I’m not holding my breath…

[princec]

All we need is an embeddable runtime library… nothing stopping Sun from making one…

Cas