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Java development on Macintosh -- is it viable or not?

Find out whether a Java developer using a Mac can be competitive, given the history of lags in delivery of tools for the MacOS

By Daniel H. Steinberg, JavaWorld.com, 07/01/97

Page 3 of 4

Consultant and author Bruce Eckel echoes the split in the needs of developers and users described above by Iverson. Bruce is the author of Thinking in Java, (freely available at http:www.eckelobjects.com/eckel. In his seminars he highlights JDK 1.1-specific features for developers who want to know what's new, but says that "where applets are concerned, I think there will be a problem between 1.02 and 1.1 for quite a while, because it will be a while before all the browsers will be updated to support 1.1 and even then many users are balky about uploading and installing new software. So everyone will need to write their applets to 1.02 for some time to come."

Another obstacle for Mac developers

Even when the JDK 1.1 is available, Mac developers may feel that they live in a Windows world. Bruce Eckel explains that he uses "a Win95 box because, due to the widespread use of the platform, the competition in the development tool arena is much greater and so language features tend to get earlier support." It is very difficult to find affordable object-oriented analysis and object-oriented design (OOA/OOD) tools for the Macintosh.

Mark Mayfield and Peter Coad are both consultants and co-authors of both Java Design: Building Better Apps and Applets and Object Models: Strategies, Patterns and Applications. I used their Java Design book as a resource in the Java course I taught because it forced students to really concentrate on good design before coding. The book came with "PlayGround," a program that supports the authors' design tools in Windows 95. Coad says that there are no plans to port PlayGround to the Mac or to write it in Java and Mayfield (the Mac advocate) knows what he "would like to see in a case tool in terms of user interface. Unfortunately, those ideas would probably be implementable only on a Mac, and there is no market (for) case tools just running on a Mac."

What tools can a Mac programmer use for analysis and design? Mikael Arctaedius has written a shareware OOA/OOD tool called Object Plant, which you can download at http://www.softsys.se/ObjectPlant/download.html. Arctaedius agrees with Mark Mayfield's assessment of the potential market and suggests that perhaps "the presence of lots of large and good frameworks like MacApp, PowerPlant, TCL" explains why there are so few OOA/OOD tools for the Mac.

Write once, run anywhere: Why write on a Mac

Apple has joined Sun, Netscape, and IBM in building the Java Foundation Classes, and also has committed to making Java an integral part of the MacOS. The MacOS runtime for Java, MRJ 1.5, should (according to the March edition of Apple Directions, an online publication hosted on Apple's own Web site) include a just-in-time Java compiler and Marimba's Castanet technology. MRJ 2.0 will include support for JDK 1.1 which will include all of the features you've been reading about in JavaWorld: JDBC, the Java API for accessing SQL databases, and support for JavaBeans.

Within the next few months, JIT and Castanet automatically will be on all Java-enabled, MacOS-based computers. Mark Mayfield sees opportunities here: "Development for pure Mac applications in Java would be wonderful," he says. "I think Java would make an excellent Mac application development language if Apple would create some Mac-specific APIs for Mac development." He adds that if, as Apple announced, "Apple's next operating system is for both PowerPC and Intel platforms, that will mean an even bigger market for Mac developers."

 

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