Jazoon ’09: iPhone development and Java
Title of this session: Development for the iPhone from a Java Perspective
From: Software Architect Ognen Ivanski, Netcetera
Note: Netcetera developed the wemlin app for the iPhone – a useful tool for navigating public transport in the Zürich area.
Ah… it’s become apparent to me that Ognen will tell us about his personal experience with becoming an iPhone developer, having previously been a Java developer. I have gone through this process myself and so it will be interesting to compare notes…
Ognen states that the first realisation was that performance, startup-time and UI were kind of new priorities for him. Not really the case for me, I must say. Canoo is known for its RIA experience and therefore these are issues we’ve been dealing with for some time. For the record: The issues which I found most difficult when switching to the iPhone SDK and XCode were:
- No garbage collection: Clearly I’ve been spoiled by Java
- XCode: Powerful but nowhere near as comfortable as a typical JavaIDE
- SCM support: We managed to get Subversion working, but kept running into trouble with things getting out of sync anyway. Best to use the command line
I certainly agree with Ognen’s observations on XCode: Like me, he missed features such as refactoring and the countless options for viewing, navigating and outlining code.
Ognen notes that XCode’s visual builder is difficult to get used to but delivers in the end. Possibly like many Java/would-be iPhone developers, I shied away from the visual designer, opting to code from hand instead. Perhaps for my next iPhone app I’ll take a look at it again.
I agree with Ognen’s observations on Objective C syntax. It’s got a “familiar and yet somewhat strange” feel to it. The behaviour around “nil” seems odd at first, but one quickly learns to appreciate that it pays not to have to check for null values all the time, as in Java code.
There follows a lot of examples of Objective C Syntax.
Patterns of note in the iPhone world: Delegate pattern, Target/Action pattern, MVC – which is perhaps truer to the original Smalltalk concept that what we typically see in Java swing, say.
In summary: A good presentation, but no new insights for someone who’s gone through the process of switching from Java to iPhone development already.
