Comments on: Cocoa-Java Porting Step 1: Triage

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 04:55:16 +0000

dylan: Love your domain name! :) I think it’s fair to say that it’s not as bad as it could be to make the switch. It’s still a lot of tedious work, but not so hard for anybody who has a firm understanding of Cocoa.

It says something that I could do the port fairly easily without really knowing (or learning) much about Java.

By: dylan

dylan — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 03:01:05 +0000

This sounds like a groundswell: I’m in the process of moving my application from Cocoa-Java to Objective C as well, mostly prompted by the last straw of it not “just working” in Tiger. It sounds like the conclusion we’re all coming to is that it’s not all that bad to make the switch.

By: Michael Dupuis

Michael Dupuis — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:27:11 +0000

Just to clarify re: the deprecation of the Cocoa/Java bridge, this effects using Cocoa as your primary API, not necessarily calling across the bridge into the Java from Cocoa. Apple still uses the actual bridge in WebObjects for things like JDBC, so while deprecated, “Deprecation does not mean that support is immediately ending for these tools.” http://lists.apple.com/archives/webobjects-dev/2006/Aug/msg01144.html

By: leeg

leeg — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 14:34:41 +0000

Port JIGS! :-)

By: David

David — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 13:42:43 +0000

Nice article indeed. What stops me from moving to Obj-C is the huge number of quality open source libraries available in Java which isn’t exactly the case for the niche-language Obj-C.

By: Gareth

Gareth — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 02:47:18 +0000

Nice write up. I’m looking forward to your future post on migrating java classes to objective-c. I’m learning cocoa right now by re-implementing older code (gotta have a project) I’ve written in java, c and .net.

By: Chris Clark

Chris Clark — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 01:42:09 +0000

Now that I’m 95% done with the process…

You can start work on the remaining 95% ;)

By: Stephan Cleaves

Stephan Cleaves — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:30:17 +0000

Very interesting write-up Daniel. I look forward to future installments. I don’t want to start a comment war or anything but it is fine to extend Thread in Java. Or at the very least it was fine and common practice back in the day. Take a peek in O’Reilly’s Java Threads book, they do it all over the place. I think you’ll find that NSThread detachNewThreadSelector:toTarget:withObject: will be a suitable replacement for a Java Thread. Although depending on what the Thread was used for you may not need to go to that trouble at all because Cocoa may do it for you behind the scenes.

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:29:08 +0000

Unfortunately, Apple has all but abandoned the [Cocoa-Java bridge].

More than that—they’ve officially deprecated it in Tiger.

By: Michael Dupuis

Michael Dupuis — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 21:40:59 +0000

Nice initial write up. I don’t forsee your overall port from Java to Objective C being too difficult. One of my own apps, SQLGrinder, was originally written in Java-Cocoa, because, well, at the time I knew Java really well and Cocoa/Obective C not so much. The port from Java to ObjC actually wasn’t bad at all. Many of the classes map pretty easily, and aside from a few syntax conversion oddites, the two languages seem to be really close and use a very similar object and runtime model.

(As an aside, SQLGrinder is now an Objective C/Java bridge hybrid that uses a very thin communication layer to pass objects across the bridge, but is otherwise almost entirely a native Objective C app as of 2.0).