Another "end of Desktop Java" scenario

Yesterday's keynote from the Apple WWDC conference didn't have a lot of surprises, at least not good ones. There's plenty of grumbling over the fact that not only has Apple forsaken Java ME on the iPhone (meaning it can't run the MIDlets that the rest of us run), but also refused to provide any sort of SDK beyond typical web applications. Even the normally booster-ific Daring Fireball is calling B.S. on that one.

But looking at the tea leaves, Cafe Au Lait's Elliotte Rusty Harold makes an interesting hypothesis about Apple's most surprising announcement, a Windows port of their Safari web browser, and draws a dire consequence:

Based on early betas of Safari 3.0 for Windows, some people are speculating that Apple has succeeded in porting Cocoa to Windows. If that turns out to be true, that could be a real threat to Java on the desktop, but a boon for Mac developers. If they could port to Linux too (probably an easier task) Java on the desktop would be dead.

Elliotte's a great opinion writer, but this seems to stretch things. First there's the concept of whether a Windows port of Safari indicates that all of Apple's Cocoa API's are on Windows, or just enough to support Safari. Just porting AppKit and CoreFoundation would be a tall order, and then there'd be the question of what other frameworks would be needed by real-world applications: would multimedia developers expect Apple to bring CoreAudio and QTKit to Windows? The Quartz graphics API's? Disc-burning and device API's? If not, how much could you really do with Cocoa on Windows? Remember, some of these are the things that Elliotte complained that Java still can't do, and Java is seriously trying to be cross-platform (it's arguably the whole point of Java). It has yet to be proven that Apple is really intersted in cross-platform development beyond a few strategic developments, mostly in media (iTunes, QuickTime, etc.). And as for Linux, outside of the Bonjour API's, I'm not aware of Apple ever releasing a Linux app (Google gives only 500 hits for "linux" on Apple's developer site, most of them about porting).

If a cross-platform Cocoa were available, would that really mean the end of Desktop Java? This takes us to the realm of arguing hypotheticals, but the idea of masses of developers picking up a new language (Objective-C) and new API's for the sake of developing cross-platform apps -- apps which, unlike Java, presumably aren't meant to be embeddable in web pages -- seems remote. In fact, hasn't this been the challenge of luring developers from the likes of Cocoa and Visual Basic to Desktop Java in the first place? And isn't this "there's another cross-platform runtime; let's abandon Java" story the same thing we've been hearing about Abobe AIR (né Apollo)?

At the end of the day, Java, AIR, and the hypothetical cross-platform Cocoa will compete with each other and with single-platform technologies for developers' business. Whichever ones solve the right problems for people should eventually win out. It's a competition that's really been re-energized in the last few months, and let's not call it over before it's even begun.