Java is a language most commonly associated with cross-platform code. When Apple bought NeXT, it gained a lot of experience with Java. NeXT, at that time, made a lot of its money selling the WebObjects web application platform. This was originally written in Objective-C but was ported to Java with version 5. Newer versions are now free and included with the XCode developer tools. Programmers wanting to use Java on OS X have two choices. They can stick to Pure JavaTM and not make use of any of the Apple-specific code. This is an obvious solution for porting code from other platforms. Historically, OS X was one of the better places to run Java code. Apple was among the first to implement a VM capable of sharing class files between multiple apps, and it spent a lot of effort prior to the first release of OS X adding theming support to Swing and making Java apps look like Mac apps. In addition to Java GUI libraries, Apple provided a bridge to a number of Cocoa objects. This bridge allowed Cocoa to be used from Java. The result was colloquially known a Mocha (Java + Cocoa). This had a few advantages. More developers were familiar with Java than Objective-C, and Java had a few features that Objective-C lacked, such as garbage collection. The converse was also true.
Java did not gain support for proxies until 1.3. Unfortunately, over the intervening years, Apple lost interest in Java. As of 10.3, Apple deprecated Mocha and no APIs introduced in Cocoa since then have been exposed via the bridge. This decision was largely caused by developer apathy. Cocoa is a big API, and Objective-C is a small language. If you are going to go to the effort of learning Cocoa, learning Objective-C is not much additional work and has the benefit of being the language Cocoa was designed for. Java has much more limited support for reflection than Objective-C. Apple has spent a lot of time optimizing parts of the Objective-C runtime library so that you can write programs that use introspection-driven mechanisms for keeping model and view objects synchronized. Doing the same in Java would be a lot harder.
Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)
Java did not gain support for proxies until 1.3. Unfortunately, over the intervening years, Apple lost interest in Java. As of 10.3, Apple deprecated Mocha and no APIs introduced in Cocoa since then have been exposed via the bridge. This decision was largely caused by developer apathy. Cocoa is a big API, and Objective-C is a small language. If you are going to go to the effort of learning Cocoa, learning Objective-C is not much additional work and has the benefit of being the language Cocoa was designed for. Java has much more limited support for reflection than Objective-C. Apple has spent a lot of time optimizing parts of the Objective-C runtime library so that you can write programs that use introspection-driven mechanisms for keeping model and view objects synchronized. Doing the same in Java would be a lot harder.
Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)
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