Is Steve Jobs right about Java?

After Apple’s iPhone announcement, Steve Jobs blasted Java during interviews.

In an interview with David Pogue of the New York Times, Steve Jobs said that the iPhone will not be shipped with Java because it’s “a big heavyweight ball and chain that no one is using anymore.”

The first reaction amongst many in the Java community might have been outrage. After all, there are many passionate Java developers out there. (In fact, I’ve heard through the grapevine that James Gosling, a longtime Mac fan, has swapped out his MacBook Pro in favor of a notebook running Solaris 10. That’s only a rumor of course.)

However, although I’m passionate about Java, I wasn’t upset by the comment, nor was I angry at Steve Jobs. And I’m certainly not going to abandon my Mac. Instead, I decided to analyze his remarks; Steve isn’t one to say something in the press unless he feels strongly about it. My opinion is that he’s both right and wrong.

He’s wrong, obviously, in that developers are certainly still using Java to create new and innovative solutions. But he has some points with the “bloated” remark if you compare Java to Ajax technology on the client (web browser). If the iPhone does indeed ship with a fully functional Safari browser as Steve announced, then it’s a simple matter of sending some extra bytes of JavaScript down with your HTML page to get a dynamic web application, as opposed to downloading a Java application, applet, or Java Web Start component. When compared to a browser with dynamic HTML and XML support built-in, Java doesn’t stand a chance against JavaScript in terms of size and ease of deployment.

However, this isn’t true in all cases. One industry heavyweight (Google) is using Java for its mobile email clients. Sun’s CEO Jonathon Schwartz made this clear to Steve Jobs personally, as mentioned in this video interview.

Google’s not the only one; I personally use a Java ME application on my RAZR to access my Yahoo email account. Looking at this further, you need to remember that Java ME is currently installed on billions of existing, and newly shipping, cell phones and other mobile devices all over the world. The reason developers, cell phone manufacturers, and carriers like Java is because it has become a standard. Simply write your application in good old Java, and you instantly have a market on billions of cell phone clients world wide. There’s an enormous amount of opportunity there that developers would be foolish to pass up.

Because of Java’s write-once-run-anywhere mantra, you can be assured that the application will run mostly as you intended it to on all of these devices. As for the manufacturers that put Java ME on their devices, they even have choices. You can install CLDC with the Java KVM, which literally means the JVM is only kilobytes in size. Or, alternatively, you can ship with CDC (http://java.sun.com/products/cdc/index.jsp), which requires a little more room, but offers some richer features for the developer. Recently, since devices are getting more powerful, Sun has started pushing Java SE embedded as a choice. This puts mobile devices potentially on par with the version of Java SE you and I use daily on our desktops (Mac, Windows, Linux, or Solaris – an example of choice and flexibility in its own right).

With Java already on billions of mobile devices, some of which are just as powerful as desktop computers from only a few years ago, suddenly Java doesn’t look like the ball and chain Steve Jobs described it as. Instead, it looks like a huge community and economic opportunity that Apple will be missing out on. Or, more likely, it’s a huge opportunity for some third-party company that decides to build and sell an iPhone-specific version of Java SE embedded.

What's your opinion on this whole matter? Is Java big and bloated? Would you like to see Java on Apple's iPhone? After all, developers have quite a lot of power when it comes to technology direction.

-EJB

Posted by Eric Bruno at 10:46 PM  Permalink