I know precisely what you were thinking when the news about the iPhone SDK came out at last week’s Apple event: what about all those Java applications I want to run on my iPhone? Rest easy, friend, for you are not alone in your wondering. If running cross-platform apps based on the programming language that I hated learning in my one and only Computer Science class ever is your cup of, well, joe, then you will be taken care of.
Sun, the makers of Java, have announced that they will be bringing a Java Virtual Machine to the iPhone, based on Java Micro Edition (ME).
“Once our JVM is on the phone, we anticipate that a large number of Java applications would run on the phone,” [Sun vice president of Java marketing Eric] Klein said.
“We’re going to work to make sure that the JVM offers the Java applications as much access to the native functionality of the iPhone as possible,” said Klein.
While that seems like it would certainly open up the iPhone to a lot of pre-existing applications, it remains to be seen exactly how a JVM would work on the iPhone, given the restrictions of the SDK—Sun, however, remains confident that it will work, and plans to make the JVM accessible for the iPod touch as well.
I can probably count the number of Java apps that I would use on a single hand or less, but I dig that plenty of people might find this useful. What do you say: good? bad? almost certainly ugly?
MACWORLD.COM
