Steve Jobs is sooo wrong

Recently in an interview with the New York Times Steve Jobs said that the iPhone will not ship with Java due the Java ME implementation being too large and that no one is using it anymore. My reaction to that might not be an outrage, but at least a bit upset as Mr. Jobs is somewhat influencal, at least among his fellow CEO:s and upper management in some large corporations. Some years ago Steve Jobs claimed dusing his keynote at the JavaOne conference that the Apple Macintosh would soon become the best environment for Java development. I know, I was there. Well, did we see anything in that direction? Big words, but no action in the end ...

Among the Java community it is probably frowned upon and seen as yet another statement by the Apple CEO. Eric Bruno at DDJ captures it quite well in his blog-entry. In his blog he mentions Google using a Java based client for its mobile email clients, etc. I would like to add another powerful, and very useful, application to the list; Opera Mini. Or click on "mini.opera.com" if you are reading this from your mobile device.

Opera Mini is a Java application that in part is installed on your phone, or whatever mobile device you've got. The other part resides on Opera's server, i.e. the installation is optimised by running some tests when you use it for the first time. The server-browser combintaion will compress the pages, the images in particular, you are browsing in a for your device optimised way. I have been using it for a while now and I see that surfing is way quicker using the Opera Mini browser than the browser bundled with the device.

So there are useful applications made in Java that are effecient on mobile devices. As we also have seen in the Java SE world Java is in a way becoming the language of choice for systems programming. Languages like JRuby are produced this way. I wonder how long it will be before we start see this development on mobile devices as well?

And, by the way, there are people around that require mobile devices to fully support Java. See Ove's blog-entry where he actually comments on the iPhone and its need to have Java ME bundled. So Steve, I think you will have to reconsider. Nothing wrong with that, just accept that there is a community out there. You should not let them down...