jessenoller.com

Ok. So Sun has come out stat­ing they’re start­ing work based on the SDK released by Apple for the iPhone ear­lier this week to port the JDK over to the iPhone.

Quot­ing the sun rep:

“Now, the iPhone is open” as a tar­get plat­form, Klein said. The free JVM would be made avail­able via Apple’s App­Store mar­ket­place for third-party applications.

Now, as com­ments there and else­where have pointed out — there’s a clause in the Agree­ment that comes with the SDK for­bid­ding appli­ca­tions from being placed on the App­Store that can execute/interpret “other appli­ca­tions” — to whit:

3.3.2) An Appli­ca­tion may not itself install or launch other exe­cutable code by any means, includ­ing with­out lim­i­ta­tion through the use of a plug-in archi­tec­ture, call­ing other frame­works, other APIs or oth­er­wise. No inter­preted code may be down­loaded and used in an Appli­ca­tion except for code that is inter­preted and run by Apple’s Pub­lished APIs and builtin interpreter(s).

So — unless Sun plans on mak­ing a JDK that a) doesn’t run any­thing or b) can be com­piled into an appli­ca­tion that is to be sold on the App­Store (pro­vid­ing the run­time for the app, like a self-standing .jar/.war) then I can’t see this hap­pen­ing, and option a is about as use­ful as a toi­let bowl filled with taco meat.

On the other hand, option b: Mak­ing a run­time they release out­side of the app store for appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers to use to write an appli­ca­tion in Java and then have it compile-down to an Objective-C runtime/bytecode binary — then it could work, but those would be some *fat* bina­ries with­out a lot of magic.

Now — could the same thing be done with Python? Per­haps. Right now we have the pyObjC bridge that ships with Leop­ard that allows you mostly unfet­tered access into the Objective-C/OSX pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment. This means you can build “native” appli­ca­tions in Python.

I doubt these bind­ings will work/exist on the iPhone, which means you want some util­ity to take Python code and “inter­pret” it down into an Objective-C binary, i.e.: an embed-able envi­ron­ment ala what Sun may end up hav­ing to do where you write an app in pyObjC/Python and the app+runtime is com­piled down into Objective-C.

Again, with­out a lot of trick­ery, these would be fatass bina­ries — prob­a­bly fat­ter than the notion of the uni­ver­sal bina­ries most peo­ple ship nowa­days for OS/X.

It’s a thought — now I should get back to pok­ing at Objective-C and other pre-pycon hack­ery. This is some­thing peo­ple more versed in com­pil­ers, run­times and with more free time than me will prob­a­bly explore.

Ok. So Sun has come out stating they're starting work based on the SDK released by Apple for the iPhone earlier this week to port the JDK over to the iPhone. Quoting the sun rep:"Now, the iPhone is open" as a target platform, Klein said. The free JVM would be made available via Apple's ...