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Update on Java development on and for the Mac

Here's the news about the 'IDEs of Mac' from Metrowerks and Symantec. Plus: products demoed at Macworld Expo that make significant use of Java

By Daniel H. Steinberg, JavaWorld.com, 02/01/99

Since Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company has tried to reconnect with its former core customer base: the education market. This was the target in Jobs's keynote demonstration of the Mac OS X Server software (see "Mac Java news delivered from the mothership at San Francisco's Macworld Expo"). Jobs envisioned a classroom teacher running 50 iMacs off of a single G3 using this server software. Clearly, this is an appeal to K-12 teachers and administrators. Apple's pitch to higher education prominently features Java. You can see this in the online or hard-copy version of its new publication, Apple University Arts.

The resurgence of the Mac platform brings with it a need for new, better, and more software that runs on a Mac. This article will focus on the following examples: With Metrowerks's CodeWarrior and Symantec's Visual Café, developers have their choice of tools to develop Java programs on the Mac; Zero G's InstallAnywhere won the Utility category in the 1998 JavaWorld Editors' Choice Awards. It allows easy deployment of Java applications to many different platforms. FileMaker Pro is the most popular database product for the Mac. It also runs on Windows, and now this cross-platform product allows Java developers to access databases locally or over the Web. FileMaker Pro is being used as the engine for the Education Object Economy (EOE), an online community that features on its site a large collection of Java applets in a wide variety of categories. EOE and FileMaker Pro are both Apple spinoffs. Stagecast Creator and AgentSheets, both spinoffs of the same (now abandoned) project at Apple, allow students to create simulations that run in Java.

Apple reaches out to higher education with a new publication

At Jobs's August '97 Macworld Expo keynote, his first after returning to Apple, he said Apple would focus on its traditional strengths: education and desktop publishing. Apple has released the first edition of Apple University Arts: News for the Academic Community, which is available online (see Resources), as a downloadable pdf file, or as a hard copy. It features Java from head to toe.

Apple University Arts is an eight-page, newspaper-sized magazine. The first issue profiles Java applets from California State University's Biology Labs On-Line and includes links to three of the applets: EvolveIT! allows you to set the parameters of two bird populations on nearby islands and then watch the populations evolve; FlyLab! lets you design matings between fruit flies carrying genetic mutations and then observe the results; and TranslateIT! lets you synthesize new proteins from RNA sequences you create. There is also a feature article about Cornell's online timecard system -- a real-world Java application.

The publication's Q & A column answers nothing but Java questions, and its editorial stresses the advantages of Java in addressing the needs of the education community. Val Greenlaw, Apple's director of higher education marketing, writes that "Java is transforming the Internet into a dynamic, real-time environment for teaching and learning, and is enabling the deployment of mission-critical enterprise applications."

 

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