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Comment by jsjenkins168 | Hacker News Reader

Wont writing an iPhone application with another language and environment violate Apple's SDK terms of use?

Also, this will be pretty pointless if the JVM must also run in the same sandbox as other iPhone apps. Its just additional overhead and the libraries will ultimately be limited to the same resources native apps have.

The only benefit I can think of is if you already have a Java ME based app you would like to port to the iPhone quickly.

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Sounds like a JVM will indeed break the terms, including the one about not allowing scripting languages or ways to dynamically run loaded code. JRuby and Jython would be big no-nos. As soon as you loaded either one (or any one of the other dozens of JVM language interpreters/compilers), the app could connect to the Net and download new code. Apple does not want to allow that.

Oh man, this could be a big issue for Apple. Unless they had access to your source, how could they even know that your application utilizes dynamically loaded code/scripting?

Your application could be: Python -> Jython -> JVM -> compiled iPhone native and Apple cant tell the difference (or could they?).

Also, since everything runs in the same sandbox, Apple would technically not be able to stop people using the JVM with their applications. The JVM itself is not its own application, its just used to translate java byte code to native iPhone code for your application. Again this raises potential issues on how Apple could police that.

It would be quite easy to inspect the bytecode and find if the class loader would be invoked. I don't believe that you can eval source with mobile Java, so its fairly watertight.

There's all kind of stuff in TOU's that the lawyers insist on. I think Apple are actually concerned that people will run telephony apps across the mobile network. So the threat isn't in the language/environment per se, it's the apps they might support. Presumably a delinquent app can be identified by its traffic and the iPhone disabled whatever language is used.

There are thousands of java me based games. The market is actually quite thriving (at least here in Europe), as kids seem to like having games on their phones. So, having java Me on iphone would enable selling all those games to iphone owners :-)

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