Embrace, extend – and kill. Microsoft discontinues RoboVM Microsoft is discontinuing RoboVM, the Java-to-Mobile compiler technology which it acquired with Xamarin a couple of months ago. Just six months ago, RoboVM was a small but growing business catering to developers wishing to use their Java skills – or port existing Java applications – to iOS and Android. Using an AOT (ahead of …
"If you want to keep dong cross platform mobile dev using Java just use Codenameone. It was always more mature and a better solution than RoboVM IMO."
wut. Codename one is a hot mess of a product. I mean I wish them the best and all, but it was never as feature complete or as well polished as RoboVM.
'Paul Maritz also explained to Intel representatives that Microsoft’s response to the browser threat was to “embrace, extend, extinguish”; in other words, Microsoft planned to “embrace” existing Internet standards, “extend” them in incompatible ways, and thereby “extinguish” competitors.' ref
Oracle has just refused again to settle with Google - who did nothing more than reimplement Java *from scratch* but providing the same APIs - and many more years of litigation are on the cards.
So it seems to me that any business based on compilers or application runtime environments would be very wise to keep away from Java (even one with pockets as big as Microsoft). MS has no strategic interest in enhancing the Java ecosystem.
This is ludacris. The idea of feasible alternatives is quite frankly hilarious as it implies you are willing to use poorer quality applications to boycott a company because it does not support the language you primarily use for development (I assume you must know other languages).
I am actually thankful, retrospectively that Microsoft got out of the Java business when Sun sued them almost 2 decades ago. If they had not, even more people would be writing in Java today and there are way too many people writing in it as it is.
As a developer, the least attractive thing about the Android platform is and has always been the Java programming language. Java started as a bad language (verbose, dogmatic, and uniquely lacking in expressiveness) and rapidly declined into an even worse one when compared to its competition as it failed to evolve. There are however, good languages on the JVM such as Scala and Kotlin.
That said, I feel bad for anyone who depended on the RoboVM.
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