
YouTube - Developing iPhone Applications using Java - abl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8nMpi5-P-I&feature=related
======
tlrobinson
Nifty, though having used both languages I don't know why you would want to
use Java instead of Objective-C. Plus it's not the language that matters most,
it's the Cocoa libraries, which you'll still need to use anyway (I suppose
that could be an argument _for_ using whatever language you're comfortable
with, but I feel Objective-C is particularly well suited for Cocoa)

It seems a little ridiculous to convert Java source code to Java bytecode to
XML, then use XSLT to convert to Objective-C source code, but I guess if it
works...

Also, there's a few inaccuracies:

a) Apple isn't just _planning_ on adding garbage collection to Objective-C,
Objective-C 2.0 _already_ has it (though it's not available on iPhone, for
whatever reason)

b) He says it's a downside that there's no strong compile time type checking,
but really the warnings the compiler gives you that your class hierarchy
doesn't implement a selector are pretty much equivalent to the Java compiler
telling you it can't find a method. Just enable -Werror if you want to treat
warnings as errors.

~~~
ciscoriordan
"Nifty, though having used both languages I don't know why you would want to
use Java instead of Objective-C."

Perhaps to facilitate simultaneous development in other environments, like the
BlackBerry Java DE.

~~~
tlrobinson
It wasn't really clear from the talk, do they abstract away the Cocoa APIs so
you're writing standard Java library calls, or is it just a language bridge
where you still write to the Cocoa APIs using Java? If it's the latter, then
there's really no cross platform advantage.

