Java Vu

"Building a Better Interface with Java" (August Core) left me with a strong feeling of déjà vu. The new Internet Foundation Classes (IFC) sounded promising but also familiar. Quickly browsing the source code I downloaded from Netscape's Web page confirmed my suspicions. The IFC is nothing new at all. In fact, it's been around for almost 10 years. It has gone through three major revisions and two OS migrations. It's been deployed in mission-critical applications in many large corporations for years. It's called OpenStep (formerly NextStep). Everything described in the article is analogous to technology present in the AppKit, FoundationKit, and Interface Builder. Even the method names and instance variable names that I gleaned from the source were the same as their OpenStep counterparts. But there was no reference to OpenStep in the article, except an offhand remark about Apple's Interface Builder.

If this represents the Java "future," we could have had it back in the 1980s. If the Java revolution had been a bytecode com piler for Objective C, I'd have something to write home about.

Craig Halley
Senior Software Engineer
PSW Technologies
craigh@pswtech.com

You're right. IFC is a very close cousin to the Next AppKit. Perhaps one of the reasons for this (aside from the fact that the AppKit was/is such a wonderful piece of software and a good one to copy) is that the IFC was written by former Next engineers led by Jayson Adams. If you're curious, take a look at the FAQ and newsgroup that Netscape has set up for IFC. You can find them at http://developer.netscape.com/library/ifc/ . --Andy Turk