Occasional Thoughts

Some thoughts of what could happen if that headline above could become a reality.

Most probably you've already heard about Steve Jobs dislike of the Adobe Flash Player. A War that started when it was announced that the iPad will not support Flash and his claims that HTML 5 is superior to Flash (I already blogged about this topic). The current climax is the change in the famous section 3.3.1 of the Apple developer contract that forbids the use of any programming language which is not approved by Apple directly targeting towards the Flash Packager contained in the Creative Suite 5 (CS5). This Flash Packager can create a native iPhone application from Flash code.

This change in the Apple developer license domination eventually forced Adobe to throw away their work in the Flash Packager shortly after its announcement and a refocus on other platforms as written by Mike Chambers.

Understandably this caused quite some uproar and finally Steve Jobs has felt the need to comment on this on the Apple web site. However his Thoughts on Flash contain several falsehoods and half-truth. Jesse Warden has written a long post commenting several of such points. I recommend reading this for the details and I do not want to repeat this. Just some points I would like to highlight and add.

I'm glad to be able to depricate my own post Groovy++-with-Maven a couple of weeks ago. The Groovy++ team has already taken action and provides the groovvypp libraries in a commonly accessible repository. They also provide a preliminary version of the gmaven plugin that supports statically linked Groovy.

For details see Using-groovypp-with-maven  and also the related update Using-groovypp-with-maven (update).

Please see my update Official-Maven-support-for-Groovypp.

If you are already a fan of Groovy you probably will also be a fan of the rising star Groovy++. Even people that dislike the dynamic magic of Groovy must agree, that this is cool stuff, mixing the power of Groovy with the safety and performance of classical Java. Since Groovy++ is still brand new it lacks of any Maven support today. In the following I will show how you can tweak the GMaven plugin for using the Groovy++ extensions.

Please be aware that this is just a very quick work to get it running and might not be stable. For example I did not verify all the necessary dependencies. So further work has to be done.

Jaclin 0.1 is a small tool to answer some questions about a compiled Java class file:

• With which Java runtime is the class compatible?
• Are debug infos available in the compiled class?
• What kind of debug infos are compiled in?
• Is it really a Java class at all?

Please see the project page for more information and download links.

If you have questions or comments feel free to add them to this posting below.