Java Crybabies

So Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) doesn’t ship with Java 6. And now Java people are all sad and mad and yelling at Apple for dropping the ball on this.

Why should Apple go out of their way to provide Java 6? After the aborted Java - Objective C bridge experiments, what else is there to do? “Native” Java applications have still never come close to feeling like a native or near native piece of the operating system. Why should Apple keep throwing engineering efforts at this system?

And whatever happened to OpenStep for Solaris by the way?

Honestly, Apple has a dynamic object runtime environment heavily tied to a C based language already. It’s done much of what Java and the .Net framework are now doing, and has been doing that since the latter half of the eighties. It’s interesting to look back to the mid nineties and at the criticisms of NeXTStep/OpenStep. “Why are you using this Objective C thing? Why not C++?”

Because what NeXT understood that others didn’t was that the runtime is what’s important. NeXTStep came closest to providing a Smalltalk-style runtime of dynamic collaborating objects without being the alien and self contained environment that Smalltalk can often be. Initially tied in to a Unix operating system, it later went multi-platform (at least to an extent - I think FoundationKit, Enterprise Objects Framework, WebObjects, and PDO (Portable Distributed Objects) ran on HP-UX and Solaris, while all of those plus AppKit ran on NT, along with D’OLE (distributing COM/OLE while Microsoft was still struggling to provide DCOM)).

In those same mid nineties, there were other attempts to provide some of the power of the NeXTStep / OpenStep platform. IBM perhaps came closes with their CORBA (Corba 1.x) based SOM, which was also to be at the heart of OpenDoc. SOM was the heart of the fascinating OS/2 2.0 and Warp. It also was used in the classic Mac OS. Of course, it was there in OpenDoc’s brief life. But beyond that, SOM was used to provide contextual menu plug-ins, interestingly enough. But it was still fairly heavy, as CORBA could be. Too much wringing and wrangling to help non-dynamic languages function in a semi-dynamic world.

And then there was Microsoft’s Cairo. Never shipped. Some of its technologies found their way into NT… But the big features? One of the big features was to be an “object oriented file system”. This resurfaced as WinFS for Vista. Twelve-plus years later, and it’s still not done.

And of course, there was Taligent. Initially, Taligent was going to be an all-new Operating System, aggressively object oriented, etc. Apple and IBM together, to make a NeXTStep for the rest of us, perhaps? Except instead of a dynamic language, they decided to go for C++. But they apparently had to pump in a lot of work to overhaul the C++ runtime and try to provide some of the dynamic loading options (of Smalltalk, NeXTStep/Objective C, etc). It was a lot of time wasted, I’m sure. And they eventually had to pull back from the all-new operating system plan. That was probably wise, considering the environment of the time. Apple never was able to complete Copland and Gershwin, and Microsoft never got Cairo finished; BeOS never found a substantial market; and even early NeXT-era Apple wasn’t able to sell the idea of a NeXTStep based Mac OS until they provided the Carbon migration path for the classic Mac APIs.

So Taligent shifted to providing, like OpenStep, differing layers that would provide these object features on top of differing host operating systems. Still never happened. Which is a bit of a bummer - they had some paradigms that would have been interesting to see.

In 1994, Jon Udell wrote a short article titled “A Taligent Update,” subtitled Will systemwide object frameworks reinvent programming?

Well, while Taligent never delivered; and OpenStep faded into WebObjects (providing the OpenStep developer tools on NT, NeXTStep Mach, and Mac OS X Server 1.x, aka Rhapsody); this seems to have actually, finally, come to pass. Cocoa is a killer framework for Mac OS X, with many fans. There are bridges to many other languages (Ruby, Perl, Python, among others). It’s not quite the pervasive system-wide framework that it was in the NeXTStep days, but in Mac OS X Leopard Cocoa looks as though it’s reclaiming its position as king of the hill. (For a while, there were many Carbon APIs that were a bitch to use from Cocoa; or at least those used to the comparative ease of Cocoa programming).

And Microsoft’s .NET framework has delivered similar in the Windows market. Of course, it doesn’t have anything like Interface Builder; but it still seems to have a much better share-and-reuse model than anything that’s come before it in Windows programming. And it’s built on: dynamic object systems. Unlike Java (which I’ll get to in a minute), the .NET framework and core languages (C#) appear to be taking cues from Objective C and purely dynamic languages/systems like Smalltalk: dynamic class extension, for example, is a new feature in C# 3.0. It’s also been possible in Objective C. This can be a dangerous feature; but also quite useful and usable. But it’s nice to see this in languages and systems that try to combine C, which has the benefits of familiarity, with the power of dynamic object-filled worlds.

And it’s much better than the heavy and strained world of COM and CORBA.

So anyways - NeXT, and now Apple, has been ahead of this game for quite some time. Granted, if it weren’t for Apple, NeXT would be another blip like Taligent. Except with a shipping product. But still - they survived. And their system wide dynamic object framework idea seems to have been vindicated.

So what of Java?

Java is the bastard child here. I’ve never been comfortable with it. It’s not cross platform: Java IS the platform. And it’s awkward. Even in its best desktop guise - Eclipse - it’s still a foreign environment on Mac OS X. Even Firefox is starting to feel more natural (and Firefox 3 looks to be trying even harder in this area). Why would we want it? Sun has never seemed to care that much about Java on Macs, except to try to showcase their “see, multi-platform!” message. But Windows has always gotten the lions share of the attention, even though Microsoft long ago stopped caring about Java.

On a side note, we’re seeing the same thing happen now with Flash. Ugh. It’s a memory hog on Mac OS X. Makes poor use of
resources. If Adobe and Sun don’t seem to care enough about providing a truly killer Mac experience, is it any wonder that they’re being kicked off of the island? Apple’s got the dynamic object system language and frameworks (Objective C, Cocoa); and it’s got an increasingly impressive web environment (WebKit, with Canvas support); it has bridges into and out of AppleScript, Python, Ruby, and Perl, all included with Leopard - bridges too!

One just has to look at how huge the “Java in a Nutshell” books have become to know that Java is no small undertaking. And again, I think that Apple probably has stopped caring. They’ve tried to be good Java citizens - from the Java - Objective C bridge to the all-Java implementation of WebObjects; they’ve tried to be make the Cocoa framework appealing to Java developers and probably tried to make Java appealing to Cocoa developers. But it must not have ever happened. It’s all deprecated now.

And I don’t know what’s going on, really. I just see Apple as having other priorities. It’s not like they’re (purely) a not-invented-here company. They have, after all, built in Sun’s DTrace technology. And Apple builds on and gives back to Open Source, with projects like launchd, the new calendar server, bridge support, WebKit, etc.

But Java…? Apple has no real stake in it any more. The last Java application I ran was Eclipse, months ago, just trying to see what life in a fancy IDE would be like. It was disappointing. Desktop Java just doesn’t figure into a Mac user’s life all that much. I’d rather see Apple focus on improving their primary object language (which inspired Java), focus on improving their APIs and offering more features for programmers (all done handily in Mac OS X 10.5 - from a programmer’s standpoint, it’s extremely impressive) and providing a smooth, fast, and natural platform experience (again done handily in Mac OS X 10.5 - see the still-unequaled Interface Builder 3.0; see CoreAnimation; see a sea of new UI object offerings from Apple).

Why would they spend their time fighting uphill to support a platform whose chief aim is to be an anti-platform? At best, desktop Java on the Mac could mean “runs a windows-like-application-almost-as-good-as-windows, maybe.” Well, we now have Boot Camp and Parallels/VMWare for that. Apple wants to provide a killer alternative platform, and they’ve learned that the best way to do that is to be in control. When Mac browsers were suffering - IE on Mac OS X was slow and strange (compared to near excellent behavior in OS 9), Camino and Firefox were big and slow and non-native (Camino did a decent job, but it had different widget implementations for browser skin and in-page rendering), OmniWeb looked beautiful but its support for new HTML and Javascript was far behind, etc - Apple took control of their destiny by building Safari. And they built in on a toolkit that would let them plug in the right widgets and behavior for a native experience. Hence, all Safari users have long enjoyed having spell checking support in their TextAreas. We get that from Cocoa. As of Mac OS X 10.5, we can turn on grammar checking as well. And now, WebKit is leading much of the HTML 5 charge, recently announcing preliminary support for client side database storage, and were among the first (if not THE first) to put forward tags like canvas which may make SVG usable and make ultimately take care of many uses of Flash (remember when Flash was purely an animation tool?). Apple has all of this in their control. They don’t have to put up with lackluster players / viewers from Adobe.

And I think it’s become pretty clear that Apple’s preferred solution at this time for rich cross-platform(ish) UI and Code is - the web. HTML, CSS, Javascript. It powers Dashboard; it’s been a big selling point of the iPhone (although it is admittedly laughable that Apple said “Web 2.0 apps are your iPhone API!”, but it’s still impressive; people have built some very impressive apps with that very system).

Why does AJAX / DHTML succeed where Applets have failed? And even Flash does poorly? It’s not just because it’s “everywhere”, without a need to install and deal with a JRE. It’s because AJAX is part of the web page. It’s not a self contained rectangle that can do really cool things - within the realm of that rectangle. It’s because AJAX leverages the browser’s toolkit, so that a text field in IE behaves like a text field in IE; and a text field on a Mac behaves like a text field on a Mac. Java performance has never been that great on the Mac. Which must mean that no one cared enough to really try to make it shine, or that the technology is really heavy and inferior. I remember groaning every time I used to check the snow report page at one of the ski resorts because of the extra amount of time taken to load up Java and all that accompanies it just to render some scrolling-headlines; scrolling headlines whose text didn’t match (or even anti-alias with) the surrounding text. It’s absolutely useless and pointless. Granted - I have seen some impressive Java applets in the science arenas, and IBM had some cool chess ones in their old Deep Blue v Kasparov (?) challenge. But again, those have been few and far between.

The two desktop Java apps that I’ve used heavily at points in the past, besides my experiments with Eclipse, were with a UML tool, and then LimeWire. Both of these used on Macs. The UML tool was tolerable, but barely. Limewire was terribly slow - click and wait instead of click and point. Desktop Java is dead to me. I don’t know why you’d want to write in it. Cocoa is just an all out balls out better environment, especially for UI programming as (again) Interface Builder remains peerless. And .NET, especially with the Mono implementation, is a far more interesting playground that seems keen on taking in new dynamic, declarative, and functional features, (LINQ, F#, etc), while Java just feels like a big stack of alphabet soup and static typing and not much else. (Although I do understand that Java 6 has started to break this mold).

And as far as languages go: please. Python, Perl, and Ruby alone offer better cross platform capabilities than Java: especially on the server side where Java is supposed to shine. I didn’t have to wait for Apple’s blessing to use Python 2.5 on my desktop Mac. I didn’t have to wait for Apple’s blessing to draw native widgets with it either. I didn’t have to wait for Apple’s blessing to use Python 1.x to control other applications across the scripting bridges of Mac OS 7, 8, and 9.

Now that Java is Open Source (it is, isn’t it?), maybe the Java community can look into what it would take to provide a good Java experience on Mac OS X. I think that is its only hope. It has to become leaner. The dynamic “scripting” language crowd have all been able to find ways to take advantage of different platforms. Why is it on Apple’s head to provide Mac Java? Going back to what I asked earlier - is Sun going to try to get OpenStep going again on Solaris? Is Microsoft going to provide Java 6 for Windows? Is Apple going to provide .NET 3.5 for the Mac?

A response I’ve seen in the Java community is that Apple is arrogant for not shipping Java 6 with Leopard, and for withdrawing any development downloads and many topics related to Java on the Mac. I think that it’s arrogant of the Java community to think that they matter enough for Apple to continue to sink engineering resources into the platform. They’ve sunk a lot in over the years, and there’s never been a huge payoff. I see no reason for them to continue. They have far better alternatives.

IBM or Sun or anyone else out in the Java / Open Source community should take it upon themselves to provide a good platform if they really care. They’re obviously doing it for Linux and Windows.

Sorry, this is a long and rambling post and now it’s quite late at night when I swore I would be going to bed early. But seriously - Java has not mattered to me as a developer or Mac user for years. It’s a dead weight for Apple. Support for Mac OS “Classic” got the boot in Leopard, and even Carbon is looking like its days are numbered. If those two can be cut off, what the hell chance would Java have?