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Macworld report: Big news for Macintosh enthusiasts

Mac OS X will move Java on the Mac from also-ran to serious contender

By Daniel H. Steinberg, JavaWorld.com, 01/19/01

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Metrowerks's CodeWarrior

Metrowerks's CodeWarrior, the traditional development environment for work done on and for the Mac OS, was one of the early tools used for porting classic applications to Mac OS X. Randy Little, product marketing manager of desktop products for Metrowerks, says that the company's Java strategy aims to provide end-to-end support. Further, Metrowerks Media Manager Jeff Tieszen reported, "When OS X ships, our full Java support will be there, just as it was on Classic Mac OS."

Metrowerks is not ready, however, to completely support Java development on and for Mac OS X. CodeWarrior's RAD tools aren't yet in place and the support for the tools that target writing Mac OS X native applications aren't expected until May.

Now that Metrowerks is owned by Motorola, it will place emphasis on embedded products including J2ME support, emulation of various smaller devices, and a focus on the cell phone and PDA markets. A second goal for Metrowerks: beef up enterprise support with the next release of Java tools expected midyear.

Borland's JBuilder4

The JBuilder4 demonstration just blew me away. Forget for a minute what the product did and concentrate on what it is: a large application written entirely in Java. It looks great and runs fast on Mac OS X. Dispelling the myth that real Java applications are too slow and unresponsive, Blake Stone, chief scientist of Borland's Java business unit, contended that, "Java is tremendously fast."

Stone made it clear that his demonstration featured the shipping JBuilder4 byte code available on other platforms. This one happened to be running on the Mac OS X JVM with the Aqua look and feel. He illustrated the product's dynamic responsiveness by employing the source code editor to add a variable that instantly appeared in the structure pane. Because JBuilder4 does parsing on the fly, Mac-based Java programmers will get the code completion help they've come to love while developing on other platforms. Stone demonstrated a long list of features in the debugger, source code editor (including templates), and graphical design editor. What's exciting to Mac developers is that these tools that have been available on other platforms will now be available on Mac OS X.

QuickTime for Java

Apple's QuickTime for Java Engineering Manager, Bill Stewart, performed two demonstrations. The first showed a Java application employing a live camera broadcasting with QuickTime. A second machine opened a QuickTime movie and showed that it was receiving the live feed. The broadcast APIs are not shipping on Windows machines. His second demo showed Java code embedded in a QuickTime movie. This enables you to have Java code (from any of the standard APIs except AWT) executing at runtime and interacting with the movie.

Apple has updated QuickTime for Java to the current shipping version of QuickTime 5. Stewart mentioned that his team has "integrated some of the QuickTime for Java and QuickTime stuff to Swing components and we've seen improved performance there." Further, he noted that because Java is a great language to work with, it makes sense to provide a Java API to the core audio and MIDI services shipping with Mac OS X. In addition, the QuickTime team plans to add Java access to layers on top of MIDI, including software synthesis technology. Stewart explained that there will be strong support for the basic audio services needed by developers of games and audio-intensive applications.

 

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