Well, this thread, after all, is about the developer preview, and we are developers discussing developer issues, so this is all pertinent to the topic.
My own client/server app went through many technologies and approaches -- including before my tenure at the company -- before we settled upon client-side Java (and later Java servlets as well, but still C/C++ for core server-side computational stuff), back in 2001.
We also were cloud-based at various points in times, but I am very anti-browser when it comes to sophisticated apps as it limits workflow, as browsers are resource hogs like no other apps, and makes multi-tasking, cross-referencing, and inter-app integration way more tedious and counter-intuitive. Every technology has its place, of course!
I may have to conform to later products that got absorbed through acquisition, by switching at least partially to Nokia's Qt (formerly from Trolltech in Norway), which also insulates the OS level specifics from the developer, but I like the direction Java is going in under the new stewardship of Oracle so am starting to argue for preserving the Java technology choice as it also is a bit easier to tailor to platform look-and-feel vs. making everything look like Windows on all platforms.
The problem is that Java is not available on iOS, from what I understand. The people I know in Silly-con Valley who write phone apps are going crazy having to write distinct code bases for each platform, with almost no code-sharing between them, and with iOS being the hardest to write for.
I'm wondering if some of this will change as Apple seems to now be integrating the iOS and OS X platforms. Apple's official policy for a couple of years has been ObjectiveC for primary language coding and Ruby for scripting.
The new wrinkle is that Apple has dropped support for Java. I am hoping this will turn out to be a good thing, as I have always had to lag one release in functionality due to the slow adoption of each release on Mac OS X. I think Apache or another open source community may take it on, as OS X is Unix-based and there's already some rumbling that existing ports for Linux and other flavours of Unix may simply add the OS X support for Java as well. I doubt Oracle will take it on themselves. But I am optimistic that Java will revive on the Mac soon (it still works; there just aren't any more planned updates), and will be more consistent with releases for other platforms.
The funny part is that Java on the Mac is way better than on Windows, in almost every respect. Qt's GUI toolkit is better designed than AWT/Swing, and more spartan than IBM's SWT/JFace/RCP, but I can't figure out why Qt fonts seem so fuzzy when Java has such sharp anti-aliased fonts on the Mac (though it is a preference for Java).
For examples of Qt in use, look at East/West PLAY, Vienna Instruments PRO (but not vanilla Vienna Instruments), all of the voice editors for Yamaha's MOTIF XS and XF line, and I think maybe other analog synth voice editors from Sound Tower as well. Maybe also Cubase. To me, they are all a bit fuzzy and Windows-like, but as I mentioned earlier, I'm not yet doing Qt development at my company so I'm not sure if it's simply a matter of anti-aliased fonts having been turned off.
I have worked some with Apple's developer tools, and much prefer them to what is available on Windows. They really thought things out. I used Code Warrior years ago, on all platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, etc.) before Metrowerks was absorbed by Motorola and lost interest in anything other than embedded systems. Apple's Cocoa developer's kit has an excellent and highly adaptive workflow. Even Eclipse IDE is better on the Mac than on Windows, as you get more complete access to source code for dependencies and core language support.
So, I can say that I like ObjectiveC quite a bit, but it is not an option for me, as I am a sole programmer with only occasional additional resources, and cannot afford the development time of doing separate versions of apps for different platforms. I'm not quite sure why this is a Mac-only language, as so many single-system languages get ported by some resourceful third-party at some point. But C# is also an excellent language -- arguably an improvement upon both C++ and Java -- that is off the table for consideration due to being Windows-only. I think in that case it is due to being layered atop some OS-level dependencies such as .nET. Maybe something similar applies to ObjectiveC.
Am I right that most iOS apps are written in ObjectiveC, or is the iOS developer toolkit based on yet another set of tools and languages? And if so, does this have implications for OS X Lion when it comes out, being that apps might start porting from iOS to OS X and form a subset of a user's full desktop Mac experience, with enough shared commonality with their mobile solution that it becomes almost a parallel to Windows vs. Windows Embedded in terms of expectation of one being more or less a limited subset of the full system?
BTW, although it seems like I've provided a lot of details about my day job, none of this aspect is proprietary and is freely discussed on our website.
Well, except for maybe strategic stuff, which is up in the air anyway. Our end users seem to like Qt, so I may be the odd one out in having mixed feelings about its better toolkit and better vector graphics support but in my view illegible fonts
.
Silly Apple.