On a New Road : James Gosling on Apple and Java

http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/steve_jobs_comments_on_apple

by muon • 16 years ago

101 82 16 years ago

Not sure I get the point.

cmiles74• 16 years ago

J. Gosling's point isn't entirely clear to me, either. I came away with the impression that Oracle is a difficult company to deal with. Perhaps he's trying to draw a line between Oracle being difficult and Apple deciding they no longer want to do their own port. I supposes that's possible.

Still, it seems more likely that Apple decided that the cost of maintaining the Java port on OS X simply wasn't worth it. In the same manner that they decided that nobody wanted to use Flash on their smart-phones, they've decided that nobody wants to use Java on their laptops or workstations.

bad_user3• 16 years ago

Cutting costs is not the same thing as banishment.

On Flash they took a political stance, i.e. Flash is proprietary, HTML5 / H.264 is the future, long-live Quicktime.

gaiusparx• 16 years ago

My guess: 1. the port of Java to Mac OS X Lion is affecting the schedule for a summer 2011 release for Lion. 2. Mac App Store is not accepting desktop Java app.

jonhendry6• 16 years ago

I think they've decided that, at this point, Java is within a few years of being a floppy disk drive in the iMac era.

Okay, that's a little harsh. But apart from Android, Java doesn't seem to have much buzz these days. And Android gets into the whole lawsuit mess.

Also, there seems to be a lot of disruption in the Java space due to the Oracle acquisition. IBM ditching Harmony for OpenJDK, the Oracle/Google lawsuit, etc.

This seems like an opportune time to step away. Since the whole Java ecosystem is stirred up and reconfiguring, it makes sense for Apple to pull back before a new configuration has solidified. While things are fluid, let the Java organizations figure out what they want to do with OS X.

babblefrog• 16 years ago

Java the language may not have much buzz, but other languages running on the JVM sure do. And they will be equally effected, whatever happens.

davidw• 16 years ago

It's "Gosling". Seems to have some sour grapes, but that doesn't make him wrong.

YooLi2• 16 years ago

It doesn't make him right either.

boris• 16 years ago

Sun to developers: "With Java you can write once and run anywhere!"

Sun to OS vendors: "Hey, we just promised developers they can run Java on your platforms. Now you go make it happen!"

Apple to Sun: "... you!"

pohl• 16 years ago

NeXT to developers: With OpenStep you can write once and run anywhere!

Sun to NeXT: yeah, let's do this!

Sun to developers: "With Java you can write once and run anywhere!"

Sun to Lighthouse Design: Come to daddy!

Sun to NeXT: buh-BYE!

Sun to OS vendors: "Hey, we just promised developers they can run Java on your platforms. Now you go make it happen!"

Apple to NeXT: come to daddy!

NeXT to Apple: Avast ye swabbies - prepare to be boarded, arrrr!

(...time passes...)

Oracle to Sun: Come to daddy!

Apple to Snoracle: "... you!"

stcredzero• 16 years ago

Someone should do a Flash corporate history timeline, with one of those Animation programs and animate your comments as the timeline plays.

fauigerzigerk2• 16 years ago

The problem is not what Sun said to Apple or what any of them said to Oracle or the other way around. That's not my business. The problem is what Apple said to Java developers at a time when Apple was weak and how needlessly ruthless and brutal Apple turned against Java developers once they were strong.

I'm not naive enough to see this as a moral issue. It's a quite rational and understandable business decision on Apple's part. I just doubt that treating your partners or even ex-partners like that is beneficial in the long run.

acqq10• 16 years ago

> The problem is what Apple said to Java developers at a time

Can anybody give any examples of businesses centered on selling apps written in Java for OSX please?

recurser• 16 years ago

I haven't used WebObjects for years, but I'm curious how this whole Java kerfuffle is going to affect that. Do people still use it?

cosmicray2• 16 years ago

In theory, it should have minor (if any) effect.

The existing version of Java 6 will still run (and Apple has said it will have support for the normal cycle, whatever that means).

Potentially other versions could appear.

WebObjects use of java is primarily server side, and as such has less (possibly little) GUI usage.

It may even be possible to run WebObjects on other platforms. That becomes an interesting situation if the license stipulates Apple hardware, but Apple no longer provides the proper runtime environment to use it.

biafra• 16 years ago

It will have an effect. Anyone using WebObjects will use an IDE for that. Currently all popular Java IDEs are written in Java. When there is no decent Java for frontend applications (Soylatte is X11.app only) then WebObjects Developers will have to use Linux oder Windows.

stonemetal• 16 years ago

Apple has said it will have support for the normal cycle

It means deprecated for one rev and dropped the next. Just like they handled PowerPC supported in 10.4 deprecated in 10.5 gone in 10.6. So Java will be gone in 10.8.

slantyyz2• 16 years ago

In the late 90s, WebObjects ran on Solaris and Windows. The companies I worked at sold implementations on both.

jfb• 16 years ago

It's in very heavy use internally at Apple.

funkdobiest• 16 years ago

I think he is saying that Oracle caused a lot of headaches for Apple in the past so Apple is returning the favor by trying to force them to support Java on their platform.Who knows how this will play out, but it will be interesting since many Java developers use Macs.

jimwise• 16 years ago

Yeah. Another way to look at this is that traditionally Java ports fell into two categories:

a.) The platform was important enough that Sun would lose credibility if there wasn't a good JVM available (Windows, Linux), so Sun (now Oracle) did the port.

b.) The platform was minor enough that the platform would lose credibility if there wasn't a good JVM available (MacOS, AIX, HP-UX), so the platform vendor did the port.

I see this as Apple indicating that with recent growth in market share and cachet, they've now moved from category b.) to category a.).

vetinari• 16 years ago

The a) category is not so clear-cut. Originally, it was up to OS vendors to support Java port, period. So Sun did it for Solaris, MS did it for Windows and nobody did it for Linux. Then MS tried to hijack Java and Blackdown did the Linux port. The current status is result of what happened in the past, not some master plan to support only tier A platforms.

gaius3• 16 years ago

AIX and HP-UX are very much not minor platforms in this space. 1) direct competitors to Solaris (and Sun back in the day) and 2) there's a hell of a lot of Oracle running on AIX and HP-UX (even more so in the early days of Java).

slantyyz2• 16 years ago

I thought Oracle and Apple were on good terms?

bad_user3• 16 years ago

They just don't get it ... Java sucks so badly for desktop development, it's not even funny.

     It also didn't help that the early ports that they did were heavily 
     customized - far more than they needed to be.

This also reminds me of what Gosling said about Eclipse ...

     [Talking about Netbeans] To us, Eclipse feels like something very "me 
     too" and derivative, backed up by a really strange marketing campaign

Also on Eclipse's SWT:

     The SWT thing was just...it pissed me off beyond words.
     ...
     It has all the AWT problems: it's way simple, it doesn't port very well.

Also on .NET's support for C++:

     [This] has left open a security hole large enough to drive many, many 
     large trucks through

kls3• 16 years ago

I would say that, now though Netbeans has surpassed Eclipse. In my personal opinion as of 6.5 and on it has become the best Java IDE available. While SWT was clearly superior at the time Eclipse was originally built, Swing has caught up. I made the switch to Netbeans on the recommendation of someone I respect a great deal, I used it a long time ago because it was the only IDE Blackberry buit is dev tools on and it was one of the most painful development experiences I have had to endure. I was hesitant when 6.5 came out and my friend urged me to give it a second change. I am glad I did now, they really got their act together. I hate that Oracle bought Sun as it seemed in the last few years they where really getting their technical act together. Netbeans became a superior IDE, Glassfish is a great simple to use app server, Their identity server was a great product, Virtual Box was a great desktop virtualization product. They where making strides but they just waited too long to turn the ship.

bad_user3• 16 years ago

Fact is Eclipse is an industry standard: Adobe Flex Builder, Aptana, Zend Studio, all Google tools (gwt, android, app engine), Pydev, CDT, Bioclipse.

It even has a marketplace: http://marketplace.eclipse.org/

Netbeans is just a desperate attempt to not lose control, still slow, still unbearable L&F on both Linux and OS X. And have you noticed Oracle has a competing product? Versus Eclipse that's backed by a non-profit with lots of third party contribs?

I guess they'll get sued sooner or later.

electrum• 16 years ago

You should try IntelliJ IDEA.

tieTYT• 16 years ago

I couldn't disagree more. I think netbeans is the worst Java IDE out there and has a LONG way to go.

It depends on ant for everything. The build files are very difficult to read, so it's like a black box. They are also cruel enough to name the root file "build.xml" so it interferes with you trying to make a convenient IDE agnostic build script. It depends on netbeans specific libraries for copying files (WHY?!). It's very difficult to get it to build from the command line. If you check out the hudson tutorial on how to get a netbeans project building in their CI server, you have to run a headless version of netbeans on the box to do it.

Not only that, the build scripts do some really crazy black magic. You can edit parts of them and your changes get ignored. It's like netbeans generates them every time you try to run. This allows you to do things like put echo statements in the build scripts that don't get printed out even though the target runs. It's really confusing.

It is not very organized. If you go into the "Options", it has 5 big buttons at the top. Most things are in the "Miscellaneous" section.

The debugger and profiler are really slow. When I remote debug, I have to click "step over" two times for one line of code. Expanding objects in the variables tab takes an annoying amount of time. My app is apparently too big to even start with the profiler. I've waited over 25 minutes before giving up. In intellij, the jprofiler plugin lets me start the same project without any noticeable slowdown.

Many many UI problems. You can't work with multiple "run" configurations like you can in the other IDEs. EG: If you want to run a certain unit test, you have to find it, go into it, and then run it. In the other IDEs, you could save that unit test as something to run and run it while you're looking at another file.

Speaking of unit tests, there's no way to run an individual unit test. The finest granularity is the entire file.

It crashes all the time. You're going to have to accept my anecdotal evidence here, but everyone else in the office complains about this, too.

The list goes on and on. I'm extremely skeptical of anyone that claims netbeans is good. I suspect you're using it as a glorified text editor instead of an IDE.

It's not 100% terrible though. One thing that netbeans is good at is generating code. I haven't tried in Eclipse, but netbeans' webservice generation support is better than intellij's. It also has a good Swing WYSIWYG.

matwood• 16 years ago

It does sound like from reading Gosling that Apple did this as a way to poke Oracle in the eye. The Mac has potentially become a large enough platform now that it seems Apple thinks they can leverage it against others. There is such a thing as overplaying a hand which I think Apple is dangerously close to doing (i.e. read their new mac app store rules).

What did strike me about the announcement though was how nonchalantly it was made. I have to think this was on purpose given how masterful Apple normally is with their marketing. So that leads to the question of why? Was Apple in talks with Oracle that broke down so they simply called Oracles bluff?

By the way, all of the knee jerk reactions have been very amusing. Reading comments and stories about it yesterday made me think Apple came down and removed Java from every Mac in existence :)

wyclif• 16 years ago

Reading comments and stories about it yesterday made me think Apple came down and removed Java from every Mac in existence

Right. Don't those people know that even if you're running Linux, you still have to download and install a JVM?

mgkimsal2• 16 years ago

True, but there is a JVM for them to download and install. At some point, when there are new Java/JVM updates, there won't be an Apple to get them from, and there likely won't be anyone else to get them from either, unless Oracle steps up and starts providing it.

I've said it before - Sun was stupid for focusing so publicly on "JAVA" (ticker symbol, etc) yet leaving the implementations up to other vendors. But now there's not even a Sun to complain to, so... :/

antareus2• 16 years ago

The time is certainly ripe for a better language to step in and make cross-platform desktop application development easier. Seems like most anything you use (barring C++) necessitates shipping 20mb of dependencies.

I miss the pay for what you use model.

jbarham3• 16 years ago

Longer term JavaScript + HTML5 will get you most of the way there.

antareus2• 16 years ago

What if I want to burn a CD? Or make something like Cover Flow?

glhaynes• 16 years ago

It seems to me that one of the main benefits of desktop apps is that they are tightly coupled to the platform. Great cross-platform apps are very much the exception.

So my vote goes to web for cross-platform while heavily optimizing everything else (everything client-side, at least) for the one platform it natively runs on. I don't see great user experience coming through a different route.

If you do need native capabilities client-side, hybrid apps that embed a UI built using web technologies are a potential option sometimes, too.

rev087• 16 years ago

Please forgive my ignorance, but wasn't Google sued by Oracle over issues regarding Google's implementation of the Java VM? It just sounds natural that other companies would be less motivated to maintain their implementations...

jbarham3• 16 years ago

No, Google is being sued because it doesn't implement the JVM. Instead Google created a completely independent VM for Android called Dalvik, and, crucially, a JVM to Dalvik bytecode compiler. Thus Google can leverage all the standard Java programming tools, but at the final stage of deployment they convert it to Dalvik which they claim is "not Java".

Very clever and very sneaky, which is why Oracle/Sun is annoyed.

caf• 16 years ago

Isn't that similar to GCJ (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/) which can compile Java bytecode down to native machine code?

BonoboBoner• 16 years ago

Until we know what Oracle is gonna do about this, all the talk is useless right now.

The fact that they split the feature-set for JDK7 due to time restrictions (aka plan b for jdk8) does not make me feel confident about them being able to throw out another VM for a different platform so quickly.

gaius3• 16 years ago

It also didn't help that the early ports that they did were heavily customized - far more than they needed to be

I respectfully submit that the man who thought AWT was an acceptable GUI toolkit doesn't have a leg to stand on here.

whatajoke• 16 years ago

> I respectfully submit that the man who thought AWT was an acceptable GUI toolkit doesn't have a leg to stand on here.

Where did Gosling say that? I remember reading that AWT was a botched job because they had very little time to ship out a UI toolkit. They replaced it with Swing later.

And if you think Swing also sucks, then try developing swing apps in groovy. Java language sucks even in SWT UIs.

gaius3• 16 years ago

Right, but if even he was unsatisfied with AWT how can he criticize Apple for doing the work for a native look & feel?

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

So you ship a crappy GUI toolkit and you expect OS makers to do what exactly? Suck it up and deal with crap? Do your work for you and implement a higher quality cross-platform GUI toolkit? Or build OS specific tooling to solve the problem where they can? It's no wonder that both Microsoft and Apple ended up making modifications to Java for their own platforms, the platform as it existed was not suitable.

mcella• 16 years ago

Gruber, very interesting, point of view:

"Here’s my question, though: If Mac OS X 10.7 ships without a working Java JVM, will you be able to write Android apps using a Mac?"

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/10/22/gosling-java-mac...

acqq10• 16 years ago

I don't see why not? Java is GPL-ed, and also see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820418

cgos• 16 years ago

sad to see that all these years I've been bragging around, and happy to do so, with my macbook doing java dev. Finally I had a nice machine, cute os to work. Sad that some day a big corp will tell me that now it's windows or nothing. Sad to feel like apple is letting us down.

acqq10• 16 years ago

> it's windows or nothing

Far from it. First, Apple's version will stay for a while. For further future, Java is GPL-ed, and also see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820418

YooLi2• 16 years ago

There are millions of java devs, probably millions on Macs. Do you really think there will be no more Java available on Macs in the future just because Apple said they won't be working on their own implementation anymore?

julian37• 16 years ago

"[...] Microsoft violated their contract and made Java code written on Windows unable to run on other systems."

More precisely, Microsoft violated their contract when they added classes and methods in the "java" top-level package (namespace) and failed to implemented some mandatory parts of the specification (mandatory as per the contract), such as RMI.

Source: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-10-1997/jw-10-lawsuit....

On a New Road : James Gosling on Apple and Java

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