Gosling's Reply

«Ok guys... I've something to say...»

James Gosling is one historical True Hacker. He's famous for his version of EMACS (Gosmacs), for its work at Sun Microsistem and to be known as "Java's Father". Soon after Sun aquisition by Oracle, Gosling resign, because he didn't like Oracle's politics.
Yesterday (october 26 2010), I read from an italian site Gosling's reply to Steve Jobs' declaration about Java remotion from the new Mac OS X (Lion). Googling a bit, I found the original article  at Gosling's blog.

In few words, Gosling said that if Apple is going to remove Java is because Apple wanted to write on their own the official Mac OS X JRE, compliant to Sun's standards. Apple's programmers worked hard and well, but some old design decisions make development a hell. Simply it's hard to continue to support a full Java implementation. Apple has lost interest on Java in a moment where its Macintosh starts to increase in popularity together with its development platform (Objective-C and Cocoa).

Gosling also accused Apple to say a lie when Jobs declare that «Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms». As I said before, there's no version of Java for Mac OS X on Oracle's site.

What to say about? If Apple supported its Java Runtime was mainly because they belived it would become the standard client platform (in a era when converting applications from Windows to Macintosh looks improbable). When Macintosh became more widespread (since 2002), Apple's forces on their Java Runtime were moved elsewhere.

But the Apple development model for Java was right: a JRE wrote from the same software house who write the OS as part of a stack wich starts from hardware, proceed to kernel, continue with OS's APIS and ends with an optimized virtual machine and a well integrated classpath. Apple followed this road, giving us the fastest and best integrated Java experience. Microsoft did the same, but soon started to change some features of Java, making Java programs written on windows incompatible with other Java implementations (who said Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?). Maybe, if Sun would has thought seriously about a politic of openess in Java development (maybe involving IBM and Oracle to define Java new features, standards, ecc.), we would have a Java Kernel, a small and efficient JRE (just 3 Megabyte), a more efficient Java GUI (a DirectX-based Swing? Something similiar to SWT?) and a set of tools to deploy more easily a Java application (Java jar could appear as a Setup.exe on Windows, a .DMG in Mac OS X, a .deb on Debian...).

Let's think about Android: Java is Android's standard development platform. If you look where are located Android applications you'll see the "ideal" situation I described.

Android's architecture. Runtime have the same role of JRE

Unluckly, on desktop systems, a Java client means less differences among various platforms. Can you realize what this means for a market where you want to gain monopoly?

Yeah, you know the answer.