I recently announced (announcement / video) that Sun is enthusiastic about creating a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) for the iPhone. The press reaction has been generally positive, and in fact, there have already been questions about whether the Apple license agreement will allow us to deploy the JVM if our crack engineers are able to build it. I'll leave those questions to another forum, but we really do want to deliver a JVM if at all possible!
One of the things that excited me about coming to Sun was the amount of Mac mojo in the building! Mac friendly is one of my requirements for joining a company. I spent almost five years at Apple, ending my journey with them (pun intended) as the Entertainment Evangelist back in the mid 90s. In old Apple lingo, I bleed six colors. It's hard for me to work at a company that doesn't support the Mac. And Sun uses Macs! They are everywhere inside the Java group! I was excited to find a vibrant Mac community with a busy discussion list, Mac OpenOffice via NeoOffice, and plenty of iPhones in the building. Many of us carry two phones, the iPhone because it is an example of a simple and elegant user experience we also strive to build, and a cool phone that runs Java and all the apps we've come to know and love.
I've got two Macs between home (Intel Mac Mini) and work (Mac Book Pro), and plan on buying a Mac Pro this summer after JavaOne is wrapped and I gain some semblance of free time. I love the Mac and one of my key goals is to strengthen the relationship between Apple and Sun's Java team. I'm hopeful that the community that uses Mac as the core of their creative development process is going to be excited about what we are doing with JavaFX, but that is a story for JavaOne in May...
I just had to say that I'm personally a big Apple fan and that Sun has a strong Mac community. Here's a hearty cheer for Java on Mac (and iPhone ;-)!!
3 comments:
Well, I don't know how restrictive Apple will be regarding enterprise applications for the iPhone... so, would it be possible to make the JVM an "enterprise application", which is downloaded within Sun's Enterprise App Store ?
I guess then Apple would require the only people with access to an enterprise store to be employees.
From my reading of the EULA it only forbids apps that download binary or interpreted code. From what I can see there is nothing that prevents SUN from producing a JVM that developers can download and then include their code in the application bundle. Which would then ship as a single application.
The good news is that Java developers like myself would get a JVM for the iPhone -- something we very much want.
The bad news is that if you have 2 Java apps on the iPhone each is carrying the full overhead of a separate JVM.
I still think this would be more good than bad, and please consider working along these lines
One thing I don't get. Why would Sun do more to get a JVM on the iPhone than the OS X? I realize perhaps the mobile vm might be less trouble than a fully-fledged OS version of EE or SE and an SDK, but, as someone with experience waiting for the Mac VM to catch up with the rest of the world on several occasions (once with LinuxPPC beating the official Mac OS's JVM), there still seems to be a disconnect with the iPhone eagerness.
I like jockm's solution, especially if there's some way to package, as I believe others have at times, limited JVMs that correspond only to what each app needs.
In any event, yes, three cheers for Sun's JVM on iPhone. Hope Apple can get on board with this one, and perhaps it can lay the groundwork for more Sun<-->Apple programming support for OS X as well.
Post a Comment