Nothing to worry about here. This is fairly old news and, in any case, we have never used any of these custom Java extensions. We only use the basic standard Java APIs that all Java licensees are required to have in their Java distribution.
This was what was popularly known as "CocoaJava" (used by literally no-one for writing Cocoa apps in Java instead of Obj-C); there's an older thread around (from when Apple first made the announcement) that talks more about this. A search for "CocoaJava" will probably find it....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Jul 27, 2006 8:18 am Post subject:
Yes, exactly, what was deprecated was CocoaJava. CocooaJava kind of suffered from two major problems. First off, it was never used by a lot of people. It really could only be used to write user interfaces that were locked to Mac OS X, the only place where the CocoaJava libraries existed. While I can't speak for everyone, I know the main reason I write user interfaces in Java at all is to allow them to have the potential to be cross-platform, so I always used a cross-platform framework like Swing when writing Java apps.
Secondly, after its initial release Apple never devoted the resources to keeping the CocoaJava frameworks up to date. As time went along, Cocoa started getting more and more classes and user interface elements that could only be accessed through the Objective-C frameworks. If you were writing in CocoaJava, you only had access to a limited subset of Cocoa.
I personally think it's a sad thing since I don't drink the Objective-C kool-aid. It really is a bummer to be forced to learn a language that really is only good on one platform and liked the idea of having Java language bindings too for Cocoa in theory. If more people had used CocoaJava then perhaps it would still be alive. On the contrary, however, without many people using it I can see how it's difficult for Apple to justify spending the resoruces to keep the API up to date or to offer versions of it that don't depend on Mac OS X.
We don't use any of the Apple CocoaJava extensions. The majority of the Java code is using standard features and extensions of J2SE, primarily Java2D (which is a thin layer on top of CoreGraphics, really), AWT (for event handling and menus), and a very very small bit of Swing in the NWF implementation. Those are standard, platform independent Java APIs that won't be going away anytime soon.
That doesn't mean you can just move Neo to any Java VM on any platform, however. What ties us to Mac OS X isn't the fact we're using any Apple Java bindings...it's the fact that we don't just use Java. We use Java, Carbon, Cocoa, and yes, even Objective-C as a language to bring a full-on eveloping Mac OS X experience to OOo. We don't develop cross-platform VCL implementations...we just use the best tool to tackle whatever task we face.
I'm sure you'll hear more about this in some of our presentations at NeoCon
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