Seriously, this is my last stupid post about Apple and Java.

Apparently there were a few people tiptoeing across the rusty Cocoa-Java bridge when Apple decided to blow it up in 2005. Adium programmer Chris reports (emphasis coderspiel’s):

Then, disaster struck. Rather, Apple did. They deprecated the Java-Objective-C language bridge that we were depending on. We had a few choices, none were very good. We could spend 1-2 years rewriting both Joscar and Smack to work using JNI, the supported way going forward for what we were doing with Joscar and Smack. We could have spent time doing other things. In the end, the decision was made to move back to Libgaim, and just take it. In some ways this is where Microsoft is a better platform, since they inform everyone of their roadmaps way beforehand. But it’s what we’re left with. Evan, David and myself came up with a letter to send out to everyone, Evan sent it, and we moved on.

This link also from Daring Fireball, which seems to blame Adium for having “committed to using a bunch of Java library dependencies.” Or maybe it’s Java’s fault, for just being so unappealing. Or the universe, for not having produced superior non-Java instant messaging libraries at the time Adium was looking for them. But definitely Apple is in the clear. All they did was promote Cocoa-Java for a few years and then pull the plug on everyone.