java

Dear Mr. Jobs,

As I think about this Mac Java deprecation issue, I'm reminded of my own story of making the switch to the Mac platform, and how your investment in the Java platform led to that switch.

With Apple very quietly letting developers know that Java on Mac OS X is deprecated (you had to find it in the Release Notes for the latest Java Update), it's quickly time to think about what this means to Mac Java developers.

Why did Apple do this?

Seeing that they're not hurting for money at all (see Apple makes more than $1.6M revenue per employee), there are three possible answers here:

Ever need to include a Java jar file in a JRuby script? As I work to convert my Mac speech recognition server to JRuby, the first task I need to tackle is to include the Sphinx-4 jar files in my JRuby path. You can include one Java jar file in your JRuby script path very easily, like this:

require 'lib/sphinx4.jar'

where the jar file 'sphinx4.jar' is in a local subdirectory named lib, which is cool. But if you need to include many Java jar files into your JRuby script at one time, here's a very cool way to do that:

Summary: There is a Pure Java speech recognition project named Sphinx-4, which looks very promising. You can easily run their WebStart demo, and recently I've developed my own Java speech recognition app on top of Sphinx-4 to control my Mac OS X system.

So far this looks pretty sweet ... if you're interested in programming with speech recognition, a project named Sphinx-4 provides a Java speech recognizer, i.e., a speech recognition server written entirely in Java.

I'm getting closer to releasing my "programming language independent" CRUD generator application. I'm now calling it Cato. My previous code names for it were Db2App and SideKick, but when I thought about the name SideKick, I couldn't help but think about Inspector Clousseau's trusty sidekick Cato Fong, and thus the application name was born. :)