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by onewland 2023 days ago
I've worked at Apple and hundreds if not thousands of their devs use Java
2 comments

That's interesting - what is Apple building on Java? They're still on Java 6 I think? I thought they deprecated their Java system APIs years ago as well?
Been a while since I worked at Apple but it would likely still be:

- Apple ID

- Apple Online Store

- App Store

- Bug Reporter/Radar

- iCloud Apps e.g. Mail.

- iTunes Connect

- iTunes Store

- WWDC

Pretty much all of the internal apps will be in Java unless they are using off the shelf software e.g. discussions. In addition you would have all of the companies they acquired and whatever tech stacks they use e.g. Siri.

I bet most of their Java usage is web services and not Swing client apps.
Apple have an OSS framework built on Netty (whose lead developer is employed by Apple) named ServiceTalk, and this talk [1] says that almost all back end services are Java-based.

I have no idea where the idea of Java 6 being in use comes from.

[1]: https://youtu.be/Ms8vriZ6ieU

> where the idea of Java 6 being in use comes from

Possibly from confusion with the last time Apple actually shipped a JDK/runtime to the public. They used to produce their own optimized distribution, which had better Cocoa widgets among other things. It was part of the original big push to get decs on OSX, it’s mentioned in Jobs’s keynotes etc. They later deprecated it once they reached critical mass, and discontinued it; if i remember correctly, the last jdk they shipped was a v6.

I’m pretty sure I saw the word «webObject» in my url bar while being redirected to their site at some point.
Their FoundationDB has java Record Layer and in their keynotes they specify that it is used in iCloud and it is basically all icloud is java based
Not for building apps though, right?
not sure what you mean by "apps" but I am talking back-end mostly
I mean desktop apps, not backends.