Inside SWT

Monday, August 07, 2006

Hello from WWDC!

I'm here at WWDC (Apple's World Wide Developer Conference) in California. Right now, I'm listening to Steve Jobs and he's not jumping around the room screaming, "Developers, developers, developers ...". Instead, we're seeing great demos. As I look around, I see true believers. Heck, if you cut these guys, they'd bleed rainbow.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that Apple has worked hard to embrace Java. They ship Java as part of their operating system. No need to ask users to download a JVM or ship one with your product. Microsoft doesn't ship Java (they used to but they got sued -- now we have C#). Linux distributions don't ship Java (the licensing is wrong but Sun is fixing this).

Apple worked hard from the start to let people build real Java applications. They are the only guys I know who let you easily create double clickable applications that have the right icons and start just like native ones. They fixed Swing way back when to have the Macintosh look and feel. They run a version of the JVM that does the MVM (multiple virtual machine) thing that shares class files between processes and cuts down on memory usage.

Thanks guys for all the hard work!

Steve

3 Comments:

  • "They run a version of the JVM that does the MVM (multiple virtual machine) thing that shares class files between processes and cuts down on memory usage."

    As far as I am aware what the Apple JVM does is closer to Class Data Sharing[1] than a real MVM[2]. I didn't read any official documentation from Apple, however, so this may be incorrect.

    [1] http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/vm/class-data-sharing.html
    [2] http://weblogs.java.net/blog/gczaj/archive/2005/06/releasing_the_m.html

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1:29 PM  

  • Like I said, "... thing that shares class files ...". I believe Apple have been doing this for a while, way before JDK 1.5. I agree that this is not MVM.

    Thanks for the links!

    Steve

    By Blogger Steve, at 6:18 PM  

  • Dude, I am glad to see you are coming around on this front. :)

    Good to see you out here.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2:40 PM  

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