Well its been another busy week or two of heated tech ramblings in the office.

Hottest discussion was probably Apple “deprecating” Java in OS X.

There was no surprise here really. Apple have been slow to keep the Apple built JRE (Java Runtime Environment) up-to-date. Anyone remember how long it took them to update to Java 6?! But the big questions were ‘Why?’ and ‘Where does this leave Java desktop apps on OS X?’

I think the ‘Why?’ comes down to the typical Jobsian control factor. If you look at the App Store model and lock-down of development of iPhone and iPad applications, no surprise Apple would want to start locking down technologies on their desktop platform really.

The more important question is where it leaves Java apps in OS X. There is still after all the OpenJDK project which has superb support for many platforms – including OS X. The single biggest issue however is the GUI implementation. This is based on the X windowing system under OpenJDK and quite frankly, under OS X these windows look awful and integrate very poorly into the rest of the OS X windowing system – Aqua. The problem for OpenJDK, as Apple have always kept the Aqua windowing system closed source, is its never going to be an easy or desirable option to integrate directly with it. In fact it would be a huge effort. Yet without that level of core integration (things like window behaviour, key-bindings, localisation etc), Java apps running on OS X will look and feel very dated compared to more standard (eg Cocoa developed) apps. There have already been calls from the community to Apple asking [pleading] for them to release the Apple developed JRE. No replies as yet and I wouldn’t hold my breath either.

Another hot topic has been the notice from Adobe they will be closing the source for the latest and greatest version of the Flex SDK for an estimated 2 release versions.

Consensus in the Encore dev team is that this is simply a means to hide the prototype [crappy] code the Adobe “developers” have rushed out in the Flex 4.5 “HERO” SDK (which includes lots of features targeting mobile devices among other things) in time for the Adobe MAX conference. Reasons cited were the release cycle of the player runtimes and burdensome patch submission process. The latter particularly odd given that Adobe need as much help as possible fixing their flaky code!

Lastly much discussion around some up-and-coming cross-device/platform frameworks for native mobile applications. My personal favourite is libnui. But thats for another post (when I can get it building on my PowerPC Gentoo box!).

Over the last couple of days I have been busy porting the popular Cairngorm framework into JavaFX and have just uploaded the source into a fresh Google Code project: Cairngorm-FX

http://code.google.com/p/cairngorm-fx/

At Encore we have been very busy with JavaFX and are very excited about the technology. We also happen to use Cairngorm extensively in our Flex based projects as it really helps keep code structured/organized and when working in a team, is a real time saver (aside from coding in a reusable and scaleable way of course).

So a port of Cairngorm to JavaFX was pretty obviously going to be very useful to us! And as it will probably be useful to loads of other developers, we thought we would open-source it (under the MIT License).

So Nokia have made a change to the licensing model of its QT framework.

The QT framework is a cross-platform C/C++ GUI framework developed by a Norwegian company name Trolltech which Nokia acquired last year. Anyone who has been doing cross-platform C++ applications with a GUI will have come across this framework and / or used it at some point.

However, the previous licensing model was very restrictive.

The only platform you could freely develop for was Linux – if you wanted to use QT for Windows, Mac or any other QT supported platform, you had to purchase a (not so insignificantly priced) license for each platform.
This model really locked out independent developers and small development companies as the cost was simply too great. This will surely have hampered adoption of a quite easy to use and polished framework.

And this is where Nokia’s move to the LGPL (GNU’s Lesser General Public License), an open source license, should really impact on the adoption and usage of the framework (and of course extra development!).

Personally I use and also like to contribute to the superb wxWidgets open source cross-platform GUI framework. It has great platform support, is well written, has a large community behind it, uses native controls etc etc – the list can go on.
However, QT also has many benefits too. I can imagine there will be occasions when QT would be a preferred choice, for example on embedded devices.

I certainly welcome this move and am looking forward to using QT more.