QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook

Why a QuickTime for Java Book?

The strangest thing about QuickTime for Java might be that if you read Apple’s documentation, you get the idea that it was originally aimed not at Java developers, but at QuickTime developers. One of the introductory docs, “Summary of QuickTime for Java,” says as much: “QuickTime for Java came about to meet developers’ need for a way to get at QuickTime besides using C calls.” It then goes on to define Java concepts like classes, objects, and instance methods...it even has a gentle introduction to the idea of garbage collection.

To a Java developer, this seems wildly backward. The Java developer, evaluating QTJ as a multimedia toolkit, already knows about garbage collection, and instead he needs an introduction to the QuickTime concepts that are taken for granted: the idea of the movie as an “organizing principle” rather than an explicit media stream, the relationship of movies, tracks, and media, and odd legacies left over from the old Mac OS. The existing documentation doesn’t help much—the Javadoc for a given method often gives a one-line description (at best), followed by a reference to the underlying C function it calls.

The goal of this book is to offer a guide to QTJ from a Java point of view. That means introducing QuickTime concepts as necessary, treating it as essentially new material. Hopefully, this will present QTJ as an end in itself, meaning you can write effective QTJ applications without having to understand the native QuickTime API or constantly consult its documentation. It also means that as a book for Java developers, we’ll always adhere to Java coding conventions, taking particular care to note where QTJ’s way of doing something might not seem “normal” from a Java perspective.