If a fit of enthusiasm following the iPhone SDK announcement last thursday, Sun annouced Java ME on the iPhone
“We’re very excited,” saud Eric Klein, Sun’s vice president of Java marketing. “We’ve spent the last 24 hours furiously looking through what information was made publicly available, and we feel comfortable enough at this point on the information we have to commit the engineering resources to bring the JVM over to the iPhone and the iTouch as fast as our schedules and Apple’s release schedule will allow.”
This spur-of-the-moment announcement caused some confusion in the developer community, as Apple clearly states “no runtimes allowed” in the SDK EULA:
Apple iPhone SDK Agreement: “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 builtin interpreter(s)… 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.
This limitation does not only affect Java ME, but a wide range of software like for example Firefox browser. It has caused quite a bit of frustration-venting, like this one from Mozilla’s Rob Sayre:
Apple Bans Firefox, SpiderMonkey, Lisp, Lua, Ruby, Python, Rhino, Java, Opera, .NET, Squeak, Quake, Unreal, Second Life, GCC, GDB, GNOME, KDE, Photoshop, Word, Excel, Flash, Freetype and Zork (read)
Of course, any terms are subject to both negotiation and change. After contemplating this fact, Sun issued a more carefully-worded statement:
“After Sun announced our intent to create a JVM for iPhone and iTouch last Friday, there were questions raised in some blogs & forum posts about whether Apple’s iPhone license agreement allows us to deploy the JVM.
Our announcement was based on our excitement to build a JVM for the iPhone and the iTouch, as well as our assessment of Apple’s publicly available information on the SDK and related business terms. If there are clauses in the iPhone beta SDK license agreement that potentially limit third party application distribution, then these are items that we want to have a positive discussion with Apple about.
Sun and Apple have an ongoing relationship around Java SE on Mac OS X and we look forward to further discussions with Apple about a JVM for iPhone and iTouch. Sun definitely plans to deliver a JVM for iPhone and iTouch if at all possible!”
