Why Apple Has Been Neglecting The Java-Cocoa APIs
Pretty much no-one used them.
Yeah it’s right out there in the conspiracy theory side of things but I’m pretty sure that’s the main reason Apple hasn’t been too keen to put engineering time into developing Java wrappers for the Cocoa APIs. Lots of people thought they were a cool idea and started using them, then one by one they realized it would just be so much easier to use Objective-C since that’s what the APIs were designed for in the first place. Jump on Apple’s java-dev list and ask whether or not you should use the Java-Cocoa bridge for an application and the advice that you’ll get is to just learn Objective-C and you’ll be much better off.
So while James Duncan Davidson provides some good points that may have weighed into Apple’s thinking, I’m pretty certain the key reason is just that there was a massive lack of interest outside of the initial “wow that’s cool” reaction.
Oh and to respond to the original post:
Who knows, maybe someone will send me an email showing me how they accessed the WebView from Java.
Google called and suggested you search for “webkit java” and you might just Dmitry Markman has worked out how to use WebKit from Java (hint: it’s the first result). Oh and of course, Apple provided a specific API so that you could embed generic Cocoa components in Swing interfaces, CocoaComponent. Also, JDIC provides a browser component that uses a native rendering engine (IE or Mozilla typically) on Windows and Linux as well.
Oh and one more hint - when Apple says that a framework is private, it means they are going to change or remove it in future versions so if you use it, expect stuff to break. It would probably be better to take advantage of the fact that Apple added support for mixing C and Objective-C and just write your own Objective-C wrapper for a C XQuery API, that or just use the C API directly.
March 23rd, 2005 at 10:30 pm
This is a chicken and egg problem…
The bridge had lousy performance because its a problem to implement a call from Java to objective C. So Java is a second class citizen providing bad performance (no fault of Java in this case), add to that its bad reputation and people just didn’t use the bridge…
Personally this isn’t all that bad, Java programmers should use Swing for most cases and Apple should invest as much as possible in Swing. There already are minor extentions to allow developers to better integrate Swing applications on the Mac, these extentions should be improved and integrated with standards when they emerge (why is there no JDIC for Mac? Its open source…).
May 31st, 2005 at 3:26 pm
I thank for providing all above information. I appreaciate the way you presented your knowledge and experience in above articale.
I am using Dmitry Markman’s Browser designed using Cocoa and Java. This application gives the refresh problem and also when user take the mouse over a hyperlink it dosen’tchange to hand cursor. May know what would be the resion behind this.
I appreciate your early response for the same