Java iPhone port from Sun could face issues

Filed in archive Application Development on April 2, 2008

Even though Apple has given its nod to third party development for iPhone and iTouch it seems Sun Microsystems dream of porting Java ME JVM to Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch devices would not be as smooth as it was being predicted. The first glitch is with regards to the clause in the license agreement:

An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).

After this legal limitation here is another glitch in the form of technical limitation since as per Apple only a single iPhone application can be run at one point of time and no other third party iPhone application will be allowed to run in the background. Even though it cannot be termed as a technical limitation in strictest terms as iPhone runs the same kernel as Mac OS X, it could be more of a ploy to limit the consumption of RAM by third party background processes but from the previous situations it looks unlikely that Apple would give Sun such privilege. In case such a situation arises Sun would like to talk to Apple but will Steve Jobs be interested? Let's see!!