Monday, 6 August 2007

iPhone presentation with afterthoughts


Yesterday me and my distinguished colleague Stefan Z. both saw the iPhone for the first time (over here in Germany it isn't available easily yet, it'll come sometime in November). It was presented to us by our co-consultant in the telco field, a long-time Mac and Objective-C freak. He is pushing Apple technology wherever he can, and has got considerable succes with his Mac-based telco testbed infrastrustructure recently. 

He's the archetypical nerd - totally enthusiastic about technonolgy. To help you to go into the mood of the conversation I offer a couple of juicy citations: "...y'all haven't got a clue!", "...here ends your tether but I'm only beginning.", "...all the telco companies can shut down now!". 

He showed us the iPhone GUI and it was impressive: it was just as it always should be! You can operate it holding it in one hand and just using your thumb on the touch screen! His basic message was this: no other company can duplicate this on a mobile phone (or on any other operating system for that matter)! Ok, sometimes he tends to massive exaggeration but this one started me thinking. 

I guess my coleague is essentially in the right, and it boils down to the technology (not management). As I don't know much about iPhone I'll be shamelessly wallowing in conjectures now, but read on. 

The first thing I thought about was: yeah, that wouldn't be certainly possible with JavaPhone! They are doing it in Objective C and Cocoa as "Java and GUI don't mix" and "Friends don't let friends Swing" (guess who said this*). And Java is the programming language of choice today! You can even do real-time programing with JRockit's deterministic garbage collection of late! Java proponents do not conceal that Java's stronghold is more and more the enterprise application computing**. 

On the other side Java critics may say that this stronghold is rather a kind of ghetto (Java is the next COBOL - where did I hear that?). Steve Jobs said: "Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain..."*** Ok, an exaggeration, we are using Java on a project here, but you get the idea: Java is now a language for big, heavyweight, corporate applications. Nothing exciting to be expected here. 

Is there another language/system which can do something that cool? Yes, on the desktop (well browser...) you can do some cool things with Flash, maybe with JavaScript. But for the regular GUI there's nothing comparable I fear. So the Objective-C freak can be in the right. 

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 * it was the creator of Tomcat and Ant

 ** for example "Why Java?" on http://www.wantii.com/wordpress/?p=5

*** see http://www.informit.com/discussion/index.asp?postid=d1e63fde-10d5-404b-8a14-6ff0b92c1ee1 for some lively discussion on that phrase, you can google for "Java? It's so 90-ties" for some more Java critique

Reprise:


As I said, I didn't know first thing about iPhone at the time I wrote this entry. But gradually I've learnt some new things, and now I can compare my then guesses to the facts. 

1. Yes, I was basically right: iPhone uses Cocoa*, and you'll program Cocoa with Objective-C. So you cannot program it with Java - the iPhone is just 100% anti-Java. But curiously, you can do it anyway, only through an detour. Just take the GWT (Google Web Toolkit), write an Web application in Java and GWT will translate it to JavaScript, which will be executed by iPhone's Safari browser!** I find it somehow a strange twist of fate! BTW, the Google Phone*** is rumored to be 100% pro-Java... 

2. Yes, I was partially right about GUI programming: yes, Java isn't up to the task, but Sun seems to have noticed this and works on Java-FX: "a new family of Sun products based on Java technology and targeted at the high impact, rich content market"****. The reasons why a new take was needed were summed up as a following series of questions:****
  • Why does it take a long time to write GUI programs?
  • How can we avoid the “Ugly Java technology GUI” stereotype?
  • Why do Flash programs look different than Java platform programs?
  • Why does it seem easier to write web apps than Swing programs?
  • How can I avoid having an enormous mass of listener patterns?
So these are some problems! As it seems, Java isn't anymore the one-fits-all language of yore, but is complemented by a host of new languages using the Java-VM (FX, Groovy, JRuby...). So maybe it's really: "Java is the new COBOL"? 

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