Nov 14
Terrence Barr, technical evangelist for the Java mobile and embedded community at Sun,believes Apple’s plans to release an SDK for iPhone in early-2008 may result in the open-source phoneME version of Java ME winding up on iPhone.
Really? It seems like there are many barriers here:
- Will the iPhone SDK be rich enough to allow you to embed Java
- What are the licensing issues around embedding a mobile Java onto the iPhone
- If this is done by the community, how will it actually bootstrap onto the device itself? Would we see apps that require you to download 20 MB of Java first?
- I don’t think people want Java ME on the iPhone. They may want to be able to build rich iPhone applications using Java, but they would want full APIs to the iPhone device itself. Could you imagine NOT supporting touch gestures etc?
So, although I think someone in the community may go ahead and do this, I don’t know if it will become a way for people to developer the killer iPhone apps unless Apple gets behind it. What do you think?
November 14th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Well, one issue that pops into my mind is that running Java on an iPhone would probably result in slow Java apps. Already, the iPhone hangs a bit while doing some normal multitasking. Safari on the phone can’t even handle large amounts of JavaScript. Would a Java interpreter be useful?
I would think that if Apple is going to release an SDK, they would at least include hooks for multitouch, the accelerometer, and methods to start a call or send an email, etc. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Having an SDK also means that there would be some way to load the Java runtime onto the iPhone so that you don’t have to download 20MB of Java each time you want to run an app. It would either be packaged with the firmware (if Apple wanted it in there) or could be installed through something like iTunes.
The only reason I can think of that people would want to write their apps for Java on their iPhone is so they can write it for Android and the iPhone in one swoop. Which makes me wonder, why bother with JME? Just add the necessary components of Android to run an app.
November 14th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
I don’t know about technical difficulties, but:
* JavaME is not 20MB as far as I know (it didn’t come by default with my Palm Treo, for instance, and I installed it once).
* I think that a lot of people want JavaME on the phone. There’s a huge amount of existing software that producers would like to deliver to iPhone customers without being forced to learn yet another SDK (even though we all know that JME has got a lot of problems).
* I don’t think all the kind of applications need touch gestures etc. For instance I have some apps on my Palm that I would need to run on the iPhone (should I ever buy it, which I don’t think). Having them with gestures would be the best thing, but having them without is just better than not haing them at all or being forced to rewrite them from scratch.