When Apple announced that there would be no cross compiling, or using another programming language other than objective C there was an outcry amongst developers. Most recently, it’s been turned into a battle between Apple and Adobe. The issue at hand has to due with the launch of Adobe’s new Creative Suite 5. A new implementation of Flash allowed for developers to essentially create their application on the Flash platform which could easily be “ported” to all of the major devices on the market. The way Adobe went about it was by creating a wrapper that would act as a communication layer between the native programming language that the application was written in to Objective-C. For those of you out there wondering how this affects you, well it certainly has an affect, but not something as huge as in the case with Adobe. Most of us, and I do speak mostly for myself, have programmed in object oriented languages before getting into mobile application development.
Lucky for you, the reader, we will be offering some free tutorials on building simple iPhone applications in the near future. The real distinction between Objective-C and other languages like Java are the lack of limitations. It’s honestly that much more difficult than Java syntax-wise. The current restriction that will be imposed with iPhone OS 4 only affects the big guys, and those currently that rely on their products to be streamlined to the masses using this cut-out application layers. It’s all a fuss about nothing, unless ofcourse you made the investment on the products.
The reality of the situation is that Objective C isn’t bad at all nor is the new restriction a big deal. People can cry about Apple not being the open platform that it expresses belief in, but never has the Mac platform been open before! It’s not linux, nor its derivatives, so stop treating it like one.
