Java Support Coming to iPhone. Extra Bold, Black, and Buggy
No term strikes more fear and fluster in a coder than the word “Java”, and I’m not talking about the scalding hot cup of Starbucks dark roast you spilled in your lap on the way to work this morning. No, I’m talking about Sun Microsystems’s long touted (and lamented) portable programming environment designed to run small applications through virtual runtimes. Java is best known for its ever-reaching marketing slogan “Write once, run anywhere”, though veteran developers will tell you the only thing Java truly excels at is crashing.
Now, for better or worse (I’m leaning towards the latter), Java support is coming to iPhone. For end users its arrival will go largely unnoticed and have little impact, save for its manifestation in mobiles gaming. For corporate users, however, it heralds the iPhone’s arrival in the enterprise where custom Java applications are lingua franca. This is indeed important news. Just not to me. Next!
March 10th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Question for those out there in the know. I am thinking of purchasing an iPhone. With all the software updates in the works (Corporate Compatible, etc), can these be updated later to my iPhone if I buy now or will they only be available when Apple releases the next version of iPhone? Thanks in advance!!!
March 10th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Jay D., it will be a free upgrade for existing iPhones.
March 10th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Write once, debug everywhere.
March 10th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
thanks kentyman.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:22 am
That will be great… more new apps for iPhone
March 11th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Java = more games
Yay!
March 13th, 2008 at 2:15 am
I can count the number of times a JVM has crashed on any of my servers in the last year on my left nut. Once. In contrast, Safari on my Mac crashes once a week, Safari on my iPhone once a day. I am looking forward to Java on the iPhone, and if Apple is serious about Enterprise applications they should reevaluate their position on Java.
March 25th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
I completaly disagree, I’ve been a java programmer for 3 years now and I can you, current version of Sun JVM is really stable. Yeh it can be slow for frontend gui application, but considering that iPhone’s cpu has a java optmization feature (i.e. runs java bytecode natively) I suppose performance won’t be a problem.