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There is a good reason that Sun didn't want this to happen and tried to stop it in court — successful against Microsoft, failed against Google. If I remember ri
by spullara 13y ago
There is a good reason that Sun didn't want this to happen and tried to stop it in court — successful against Microsoft, failed against Google. If I remember right, most everyone on here was rooting for Google to win and continue to fragment the language.
- _pmf_ 13y agoThe question is what Oracle would lose by licensing real Java to Google at reasonable conditions. Mobile non-Android Java is deader than dead.
- pjmlp 13y ago> Mobile non-Android Java is deader than dead. Lots of embedded devices make use of J2ME, e.g. cars, manufacturing, electricity monitoring...
- thwarted 13y agoHow many of those will get Java 8 updates?
- beat 13y agoThe billionaires at WhatsApp beg to differ. They got very very rich from "mobile non-Android Java".
- spullara 13y agoOracle was offering licensing for "real Java" at around $1 per device. This was too high for Google that wanted to make it entirely free. Kind of silly, since Android hardware manufacturers pay much more than that to Microsoft in patent licenses.
- jsight 13y agoIt's unlikely that the patent licensing situation would have been different with Java ME. It is entirely likely that it would not have been completely open source due to Sun (and ultimately Oracle) restrictions on Java ME.
- pjmlp 13y agoI have since repent myself. Google did indeed managed to pull a Microsoft and now we have a forked Java implementation getting steady behind the standard Java implementations. Even J2ME is more compatible with its big brother than Android. KitKat has now partial support for Java 7, with libraries still missing some pieces. Dalvik and ART still don't support invokedynamic bytecode. And since almost no one has KitKat, one cannot use try-with-resources anyway.
- bananas 13y agoI wrote a lot of J2ME stuff a few years ago and you're spot on. I spent two weeks doing Java 8 bits with NetBeans which was really nice and spent the last two evenings writing my first Android app and what a complete mess it is. Plus the Android tooling is horrible to get working reliably - most problems being solved by "restart eclipse". Late edit: perhaps Oracle should make a phone ;)
- pjmlp 13y agoI also did some J2ME stuff back in 2003, most with Sharp and Nokia devices. I read somewhere that some in the Android team are C converts doing their first Java gig. Have you seen how broken are the generated Renderscript bindings? They don't have anything to do with Java conventions and feel completely out of place.
- bananas 13y agoHaven't looked at render script yet. Still scratching head on the layout engine stuff and View infrastructure. It's fugly. I usually write C#+WPF and C++/Qt and HTML/Java EE and all of those are massively nicer to deal with.
- stusmall 13y agoIf you are two days in and still getting around how Views and layout works I wouldn't call it a mess yet. You are still pretty early into it. Its not messy its just new to you. From my experience once you get past the initial hump of learning their basic APIs and conventions its a very easy to work with platform. Maybe I am biased because I spend a lot of time with it. I also really like the tooling. How is it acting unstable for you?
- icebraining 13y agoI supported Google because the ends don't justify means. People should have the right to re-implement APIs, even if we sometimes wished they didn't.
- squeaky-clean 13y agoWell put. Just because it wasn't a good idea doesn't mean it should be illegal.
- jayd16 13y agoForked != out of date. Android code is still Java code. you just compile to Dalvik bytecode instead of jvm bytecode. If you think that's wrong, fine but that lawsuit had nothing to do with bytecode.