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Java Programming Businesses OS X Operating Systems Apple

Java SE 6 For Mac OS X 132

wchatam writes "After a long delay, Apple has finally released a version of Java 6 for OS X. 64-bit Intel Macs are starting to see this pushed out via Software Update, but there has not been an announcement for when 32-bit Intel and PowerPC Mac users will get their versions."
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Java SE 6 For Mac OS X

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  • This is 5 days old news, and it's not that big news anyway.

    I guess it could be a reason which makes it 64-bit only aswell, or they just considered the other platforms to old to care, but that kind of suck. Pretty normal in Apple-land to consider old OS versions obsulete thought so maybe it's true for hardware aswell?

    (Never mind the Apple fanboys which says that a G3 are still future proof.... Or how macs don't crash (mine crashed today for instance, I can somewhat understand it since Safari usually pick up
    • You are completely full of it. My entire office is full of web developers working full time on Macs. We use Safari, Firefox, and Flash all day and never run into such issues. Even our Mac Minis with just 512MB ram get along just fine. My 3 year old PowerBook also never has a problem.
      • It's no wonder. You should only need a notepad and web browser for that work.

        I wasn't able to function in OSX with 1gb, so I had to wipe the system and install Ubuntu. Overall, a mac for business was a bad idea since I had a poorly supported, over priced linux box in the end.

        After spending a year around an all mac shop, I noticed people just didn't say anything about something not working until a solution was brought forward, then a collective 'OMG finally!' would be felt.
        • A text editor, web browsers, Parallels with XP for IE testing, Photoshop or other image editors, apache/mysql/php/python/perl running locally, OpenOffice, OmniGraffle, and a few other apps. Professional web developers don't "only need a notepad and web browser."

          In our case Macs are very much the right tool for the job. Those in the company who used linux desktops and laptops spent far more time dealing with application and configuration issues. They've all switched and they're far more productive and com
          • by aliquis ( 678370 )
            Yeah, please, please tell me someone would run Photoshop with 512MB (for some serious work), even more so with XP and all other bullshit running aswell. Yeah! Great! Magic at work!
      • by aliquis ( 678370 )
        Hopefully you block flash banners and they don't have a bunch of youtube tabs running in the background. If not I have no idea what the difference is. Feel free to tell me.

        Even if I close all tabs in Safari the piece of crap use even MORE ram, and for what? What is cached? There is no undo for closed tabs in Safari. What is it storing in my RAM? Except memory leaks? Please tell me!

        http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=542426&cid=23286992 [slashdot.org]
    • Maybe you just don't know what the fuck you're doing. Ever think of that?

      I've got 4GB of ram in my mac and 1GB in my G4. Both run just fine.
      • by aliquis ( 678370 )
        Yeah Mr Bigshot, please tell me what I'm doing wrong.

        Here you have a screenshot from my MBP 16:25 today, I had my browser running and had run Google Earth, quit it and I got this kind of graphics glitches, the stuff to the right is spotlight. The machine was very slow as soon as there was a line switch in a text area and in the end it halted completely so I cold rebooted.
        http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/8727/bild82ch6.png [imageshack.us]

        I quit firefox at 18.34, it used 841 MB of ram:
        http://img240.imageshack.us/img240/550 [imageshack.us]
        • My coworkers and I spend all day in Safari and Firefox and I've never seen anything like that. You have to be visiting some seriously shady web sites. Even with over a dozen tabs open I can't get Safari to use much more than 100MB of physical ram. And I have one site with pages over 600K, open in multiple tabs, and still never use much ram.

          The only issue I've ever seen is too many flash animations running simultaneously. But that only drained CPU, not RAM, and is very rarely a problem since flash's CPU
          • by aliquis ( 678370 )
            I think that maybe Opera run flash in the background, because in Opera I tend to always have much higher CPU usage than in Safari, but lower memory usage. But it makes my fans kick in and since it's a laptop it's annoying. So therefor I often close Opera with a bunch of tabs and use Safari but then I have to restart Safari every now and then because it have used up all my RAM.

            I don't think the sites are anything special, www.stylesearch.se, www.youtube.com and earlier www.spraydate.se and such. They do have
            • I use Privoxy, myself - it catches most obnoxious Flash ads. Helps the CPU usage tremendously on my little 1.25Ghz Powerbook.
        • by Graff ( 532189 )

          Here you have a screenshot from my MBP 16:25 today, I had my browser running and had run Google Earth, quit it and I got this kind of graphics glitches, the stuff to the right is spotlight. The machine was very slow as soon as there was a line switch in a text area and in the end it halted completely so I cold rebooted.
          http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/8727/bild82ch6.png [imageshack.us]

          I'm fairly certain that this is not a software problem. It looks like you have a problem with the video hardware on your computer which is causing slowdowns, crashes, and video corruption. I would bring this system in for repair as soon as possible because this problem might cause problems with other components in your machine, as well as data corruption and loss.

          Overall I've found Mac OS X to be a fairly stable operating system and the Mac hardware to be pretty solid but things do go wrong. This is alm

          • by aliquis ( 678370 )
            But I have only had the graphics glitches twice, this was the second time. And yes, my guess for why switching rows in a text area took like a few second was that core image / opengl / the graphics hardware did something weird.

            The problem with a repair is that there are no Apple stores in Sweden so I may be without computer for like a month or something, which suck of course.
            • by Graff ( 532189 )
              You've probably only had them twice because some video problems only show up when the hardware is stressed in certain ways. Maybe the video circuitry got a bit hotter than it could tolerate, maybe there was an unusual load on the video memory. One thing is pretty certain, glitches like the one in your screenshot are usually hardware problems, not software, and hardware problems usually get worse, not better, with time.
      • Maybe it's that I'm not idiot enough to use this kind of idiot proof setup?
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Graff ( 532189 )

      Never mind the Apple fanboys which says that a G3 are still future proof.... Or how macs don't crash (mine crashed today for instance, I can somewhat understand it since Safari usually pick up like 800 MB of ram and I only have 2GB and I had run Google Earth aswell. And if the machine runs out of ram you get issues.

      The Mac G3s are as "future proof" a any older processor can get. Apple has continued with every release of Mac OS X to support the PowerPC processors and they will probably continue to do so for at least a while longer. Even when Apple stops producing Mac OS X for PowerPC you can still keep on running whatever version of Mac OS X you currently have on it. Yes, eventually people will stop producing PowerPC binaries which will run on the G3 but by then that machine will be so outdated you're probably bett

      • by aliquis ( 678370 )
        Leopard requires a G4 1GHz+ from system requirements I belive, so no, Leopard don't support those machines. It do support PPC, which would be very bad if they didn't considering they are just like 1.5 year old or something.

        A G3 _IS_ outdated, OS X is the most heavy OS I've ever used, Windows XP would live very happy on this 2.2GHz C2D, 2GB ram MBP. I don't say there is anything weird or wrong with G3 being outdated, 1GHz P3s is aswell. It's just the "omg macs live forever"-bs which is wrong. And even more s
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Sentry21 ( 8183 )

          A G3 _IS_ outdated, OS X is the most heavy OS I've ever used, Windows XP would live very happy on this 2.2GHz C2D, 2GB ram MBP.

          Probably because Windows XP is a six-and-a-half year old operating system, whereas Leopard was released six months ago. A more reasonable comparison would be either to compare XP to Mac OS X 10.0.4, or to compare Leopard to Windows Vista (but which version? I'd go with Ultimate).

          Windows XP's system requirements are rooted in the cutting-edge technology of 2001, with a few increases on the way thanks to the three service packs, whereas Leopard was designed for the current and previous generation of hardware

          • How does the age of the OS affect anything? Shouldn't we only care about the usability / what the OS supports in that case? Why would we want a new OS if all it is is bloat?

            Can you run ANY current OS X software on OS X 10.0? Most people run XP, who cares how old it is as long as it can do anything you want? The only kind of missing point in it which I can think of is lacking 64-bit drivers and DirectX 10. What more prevents anyone from using it?

            I think it's ok to compare Vista with Leopard to thought. I wou
            • by Sentry21 ( 8183 )
              No, you can't run modern OS X software on XP. Why? Because unlike XP, OS X has been updated. New features have been added, new capabilities implemented, libraries simplified, old APIs deprecated. Progress has continued on Apple's side, while XP largely stagnated while waiting for Vista to arrive (and fail).

              All the functionality added to XP was bolted on, and poorly. Connecting to wireless networks is a joke. Security is a joke. The whole setting is laughable.

              OS X, on the other hand, has progressed. New feat
      • I won't say that macs don't crash, but if they are crashing on a regular basis something is wrong. Right before Leopard came out, my dual G4 was crashing on a daily (if not more basis). Since I knew I was about to install a new OS, I waited until Leopard was out before I did an OS install. I threw in a new IDE drive, installed Leopard, migrated data off of the old HD and things have been smooth ever since. If you mac crashes fairly often, then you either need to troubleshoot it or go for a fresh install. I

    • by Ilgaz ( 86384 ) *
      Slashdot is clever to post this to Developer section, after days since it should be free of the fanboys with moderation powers and let actual developers speak about the future (if exists) of Java on OS X.

      Of course the plan failed as those people found the story and abuse their moderation powers without reading a single line.

      In reality, this is big news. This is the only Java which is tied to single variant of single vendor's CPU along with single OS point release.

      Win2K which is abandoned by its own Vendor
      • by Moochman ( 54872 )
        I agree that Sun should put out the Mac OS X Java distribution.

        However, if you think any mainstream Mac user is going to want to run X11-based Java apps on their system, you must be insane.
        • by Ilgaz ( 86384 ) *
          Well, give a good tool to them to deserve the "alien like" appearance/behaviour, they may use it. A tool in quality of Azureus 3.x or Limewire. They can look like OS X apps anyway.

          Lots of people aren't aware that many of Java/Desktop tools are hits in "top downloads" etc. lists sometimes being top download on their categories.

          If Apple doesn't like the fact that their users use X11 to use Java 6 apps, they should sit and code a real Java, not a joke like this. I don't think there was any Java release like th
          • by Moochman ( 54872 )
            >Well, give a good tool to them to deserve the "alien like" appearance/behaviour, they may use it. A tool in quality of Azureus 3.x or Limewire. They can look like OS X apps anyway.

            They can look like OS X apps because they use Apple's implementation of Java.

            Have you tried running any actual X11 apps on Mac OS X? There's no menu bar for individual apps at the top of the screen, the Mac OS X keyboard conventions are all broken, the resolution is all wierd.... It's almost as bad as running Windows/Linux app
    • Man, you just criticized macs on ./
      Kiss your karma goodbye.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Dear Mac users,

    We're very sorry that unenlightened members of our organization have ported this abomination to your platform. I'm quite sure that you understand that large organizations often have rogue elements working against the organization's best interests from the inside. I assure you that we're working tirelessly to end the Java scourge. In the meantime, we offer our most sincere apologies not only to the Mac community, but to everyone who has been forced to use a Java application throughout hi
    • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      Dear Sun,

      Apology not accepted. We might have forgiven you for Java, but we'll never forgive you for NFS....

      Sincerely,
      Mac Users

    • by Moochman ( 54872 ) on Sunday May 04, 2008 @07:10AM (#23290584)
      This is starting to get ridiculous. Over the last few weeks it has somehow become trendy on Slashdot to make ridiculous jabs at "Java". Not any specific aspect or technology of Java, just "Java". And not anything specific about it, not even the stupid parroting that it's "slow", just things like "it's an abomination" etc.

      It's getting really old. At first it was stupidly amusing, now it's just stupid.

      Java is a powerful, performant (by far moreso than the current batch of oh-so-trendy interpreted languages), cross-platform, *open-source* set of technologies. This suggests to me that it offers a lot to users of all platforms, especially open-source ones. In fact, it doesn't just suggest this to me. It does offer a lot to users of all platforms, and has been doing so for quite some time now. The fact that Slashdot has now become a playground for groundlessly insulting "Java" in the hopes of scoring a few mod points from the (as usual) hopelessly juvenile Slashdot moderators, makes me sad.

      I know it's not trendy to bust into your acerbic sarcasm-filled world with my serious comment here. But somehow I doubt there are many people (aside from a few hard-core .NET missionaries) who would seriously want to see the downfall of Java anytime soon. Yet unfortunately, all you are doing by making these sorts of jokes is needlessly acting to divide a healthy open-source community and reduce enthusiasm for Java. There is a wide diversity of tools and technologies out there, all with unique advantages. Java is one of them. As someone who supports and uses Java, I'm getting sick and tired of standing by while Slashdot scheisters such as Mr Coward here hi-five each other every day for upping the Java-deprecation ante.

      Go poke fun at BASIC or something. Leave Java alone.
      • But somehow I doubt there are many people (aside from a few hard-core .NET missionaries) who would seriously want to see the downfall of Java anytime soon.

        I would probably qualify as a ".NET missionary", but I certainly do not wish the downfall of Java. As long as Java is there and at the top, Microsoft is forced to come up with more and more good ideas to maintain an edge over Java, and to give sufficiently convincing reasons to switch. If you see development of features such as generics in both languages

      • The last few weeks???

        This place is the most anti-Java site in the Universe. Has always been. If it ain't a P language then it's laughable.
    • by pjt33 ( 739471 )
      Not that you'd have let facts get in your way even if you knew them (and perhaps you did), but all the OS X Java ports are done by Apple.
  • by theolein ( 316044 ) on Saturday May 03, 2008 @04:48PM (#23286608) Journal
    What reaaly bothers me about Apple is that their support for anything that doesn't come out of Cupertino seems to be either designed to bait end users into moving to Macs than anything else.

    When Apple brought out OS X in 2001, it was all smiles as the system came with free developer tools, a Java-Cocoa API that allowed you to use Java to write native Cocoa apps as well as a C/C++ API that also allowed you to write native Mac apps.

    The problem was that the Java-Cocoa api was buggy from the start, apart from having very slow response on a, at the time, very slow user interface. Apple never fixed some of the worst bugs in critical objects (PDF objects for example), and finally, in 2005, dropped further development for the Java-Cocoa bridge altogether.

    Last year, Apple dropped further development for the C/C++ API, which is having a major impact on big applications like Adobe's Creative Suite, which now have to move to Apple's in-house Objective-C api.

    The overall impression that I get is that Apple is only paying lip service to anything that doesn't come from Apple itself. Apple was known for this in the 90s and there was an acronym for that: NIH -Not Invented Here. This is also Microsoft suffers from, in its Embrace and Extend strategy.

    This had serious repurcussions for Apple in the 90s and I, as a long time Mac user worry if it won't happen again. Java6 was available for other platforms over two years ago, and now Java7 is even almost here.

    Seriously, if you're a Java developer, is there any actual reason to use Mac OSX? You're far better off using Eclipse on Linux.
    • You were marked troll, but I think what you wrote is probably true. If I remember right, Apple releasing the newest Java only on the newest OS is a bad pattern. Some other weirdness was a long standing 10.3 bug which caused third party browsers to be unable to access the newest version of java installed on the machine. So Safari was using 1.5 while Firefox was using 1.4.
      • by theolein ( 316044 ) on Saturday May 03, 2008 @06:10PM (#23287074) Journal
        It doesn't really matter if I was marked troll. The only sad thing about it is that Mac fans are often very loyal to the platform no matter what Apple does. It makes it very difficult to level any constructive criticism at Apple, as Apple fans will often deny the criticism.

        Still, it's what kept Apple form going under in the 90s, so there must be something good about it.
        • The only sad thing about it is that Mac fans are often very loyal to the platform no matter what Apple does. It makes it very difficult to level any constructive criticism at Apple, as Apple fans will often deny the criticism.

          You could make this claim with regard to pretty much any OS and have plenty of evidence to support it. Applying it to Mac users, I'd actually say they are more likely to complain and file bug reports with Apple than say, most Linux users. I've had numerous conversations with Linux on the desktop developers that run as follows:

          Me: I have this problem on Linux.

          Developer: That isn't a problem.

          Me: Here's the use case and why it fails.

          Developer: Okay it is a problem, but no other OS is any better.

          Me: He

        • I don't think you were marked a troll because of Mac fanaticism, but I also don't think you were trolling either.

          The Java bridge seemed experimental to me from the beginning, and it there didn't seem to be much interest in it, so it went away. Maybe Apple should have done more with it.

          As for Carbon, that's been on its way out for years, and Adobe knew that. Adobe knew Cocoa was the direction Apple was going when it along with Microsoft refused to port their apps. This put Apple in a precarious situation wit
    • Long term, Apple is probably doing what is going to be best for Apple.

      I have been really heavy into Java development from the start. But you know what? I can see that Java desktop apps are always going to be a smaller subset of native apps. There just is not widespread adoption to date, thus the greatly diminished focus on keeping the Java->Cocoa bridge healthy.

      As for the Carbon (what you incorrectly label C/C++ API's), well Apple said all along that the plan was to transition to Cocoa, and that Carbo
      • by tyrione ( 134248 )

        Long term, Apple is probably doing what is going to be best for Apple. I have been really heavy into Java development from the start. But you know what? I can see that Java desktop apps are always going to be a smaller subset of native apps. There just is not widespread adoption to date, thus the greatly diminished focus on keeping the Java->Cocoa bridge healthy. As for the Carbon (what you incorrectly label C/C++ API's), well Apple said all along that the plan was to transition to Cocoa, and that Carbon was a bridge to that end. It's true that Adobe got rather screwed in particular in that at a crucial point in time they were told Carbon was going to last a few more years than Apple is saying it will now. But Adobe also had a really long time to work on a Cocoa port.... note that Lightroom has no issues in that regard. That was unfortunate for both Apple and Adobe, but in the long run it's going to make everyone switch to a single API sooner which means more support can go into maintaining and improving one API rather than two. As a side note, just because Cocoa is more of an Objective-C API doesn't mean you can't easily call it from C/C++ code.

        1997 WWDC Carbon transition API released. 2007 End of Life for Carbon listed. Adobe/Macromedia and Microsoft had a very long run--at least 8 years more than they were expected with Carbon.

        Time to move on or lose profits.

        • But then wasn't the date pushed out as "large companies" had some trouble with transition? I agree that they should have planned to that date but at that point, the date may have been ambitious given the changes OS X and Cocoa itself would undergo in the intervening years... I think in some ways all companies took the best paths open to them, it just happens here near the end game we have something of a discontinuity.

          Microsoft I feel less sorry for than Adobe as they have a more purely OS X focused product
          • by tyrione ( 134248 )

            But then wasn't the date pushed out as "large companies" had some trouble with transition? I agree that they should have planned to that date but at that point, the date may have been ambitious given the changes OS X and Cocoa itself would undergo in the intervening years... I think in some ways all companies took the best paths open to them, it just happens here near the end game we have something of a discontinuity. Microsoft I feel less sorry for than Adobe as they have a more purely OS X focused product and don't have to try to engineer a cross platform codebase (as far as I know there's really no Office UI code shared from Windows to the Mac version and the Mac BU is pretty independent).

            The date was pushed out because Adobe, Macromedia and Microsoft were refusing to move, firstly to Carbon, and later to Cocoa. I had to answer any and all questions at WWDC '97 and '98 about moving to ObjC/Cocoa--it wasn't for a lack of technical clarifications and help that kept them from moving forward: it was a deliberate vision and decions not to move ahead. In early May 1998 the first release of the iMac was revealed to us outside of it's core team and we al liked the little bugger at DeAnza College.

            • I'll bow to your obviously much closer to home knowledge about the whole Adobe/Microsoft situation, especially the history of Apple and Cocoa and them (I was not following along that closely until a few years ago).

              However, I have had close contact with some of the Lightroom team and that really was a rogue group kind of deal where people put that together from scratch - except for the integration with ACR (raw processing engine), that was totally all new stuff and really lived under the radar at Adobe for s
              • I'd love to hear more about Lightroom's development. I prefer it over Aperture, and not just cause my Pentax gear isn't supported yet in Aperture.

                I said in an earlier post in the thread that Lightroom was proof that Adobe could handle Cocoa. Obviously it's easier to write a new app from scratch than it is to migrate over a massive amount of code in a preexisting app. When you say the Lightroom team was a bit of a rogue group, can you safely elaborate more? Were they just very insightful in how they went abo
        • You should keep in mind is that Apple did say that they were going to make Carbon 64 for Leopard, but dropped it and took their sweet time saying anything about it. In short, Apple announced Carbon 64 WWDC '06, and announced there was no Carbon 64 WWDC '07.

          You should also keep in mind that Final Cut Pro and much of the ret of Final Cut Studio is also in Carbon. Apple too is taking their sweet time too. Apple had ten years to push their Pro App developers to Cocoa and have yet to actually make good on a t
          • by tyrione ( 134248 )

            You should keep in mind is that Apple did say that they were going to make Carbon 64 for Leopard, but dropped it and took their sweet time saying anything about it. In short, Apple announced Carbon 64 WWDC '06, and announced there was no Carbon 64 WWDC '07. You should also keep in mind that Final Cut Pro and much of the ret of Final Cut Studio is also in Carbon. Apple too is taking their sweet time too. Apple had ten years to push their Pro App developers to Cocoa and have yet to actually make good on a transition.

            Apple finally realized they didn't have to depend upon Adobe for growth. Carbon never should have lasted past 10.2.

    • by yabos ( 719499 )
      Not many people used the Cocoa-Java bridge compared to Cocoa and even Carbon. There's not much point putting time into something like that. They shouldn't have promised 64 bit Carbon and then taken it away though. The writing has still been on the wall that they are moving to Cocoa APIs only in the future.
    • Cocoa Java was dropped because it was slow and buggy like you said, and additionally, it wasn't being used and it probably wasn't a good idea to start with (Java is for cross-platform). In other words, not worth diverting limited resources to.

      I'm not really sure what you mean by 'dropping C/C+' APIs. I think what you might be referring to (since you mention Adobe) is that Carbon will not be transitioned to 64-bit. That's not really the same thing as dropping it at all.

      The POSIX APIs are 64-bit. CoreFoundati
  • I know there are 32 bit PPC macs, but I thought that all X86 macs were 64 bit, since they started with the core 2 duo systems.

    What models of macs came with a 32 bit OS? Or are they simply referring to mac os 10.4, which I believe had some 32 bit support, but didn't have all API's (like cocoa) available in 64 bit versions.
    • by mccalli ( 323026 )
      What models of macs came with a 32 bit OS?

      The initial machines were CoreDuo, not Core2Duo. Our family had a 32-bit MacBook Pro, MacBook and Mac Mini. I've since replaced the MacBook Pro with a Core2Duo model, but the MacBook and Mac Mini continue to do decent service and there's no need to replace them.

      Cheers,
      Ian
    • by Ilgaz ( 86384 ) *
      You forget something, G5 Macs. They are all pure 64bit and in fact, the entire PowerPC line was developed with 64bit in mind.

      I was going crazy about this fact until I heard a really funny side effect. As that JRE is pure 64bit, making it default Java applet handler in Safari will practically disable Java since Safari is... 32 bit :)

      Sun guys should leave Open Office developers alone a bit and treat Apple just like Microsoft. They should figure already that Apple doesn't like their tool, will do anything to s
    • by adriccom ( 44869 )
      Mine, thanks for asking. (MacBook Pro with a CoreDuo).

      And no, I'm not bitter. Much.
  • Microsoft's support for Java on Windows theoretically ended in 2007, and if you want to run Java apps on Windows you go to http://www.java.com/en/index.jsp [java.com] and download Java.

    If you're on Linux and you want to run Java apps, you go to the same place and download an RPM.

    On Solaris, of course, you go... guess where... and download Java.

    Last time I installed it on FreeBSD, I used the Linux binaries in Linus emulation mode. There's a FreeBSD Java project now.

    And Sun has recently announced that they'll be supporting Java on the iPhone.

    But if you have a Mac, Sun tells you to bugger off and ask Apple.

    I'm sure there's some good historical reason for this weird exception, but given that Sun's supporting Java on much smaller platforms than Mac OS X, wouldn't it be in Sun's interest to take on the Mac as well if whatever legacy business agreement with Apple isn't working out? If they did that, then possibly it'd even become possible to get up-to-date Java support for older versions of OS X.

    How about it, Sun, are you willing to put your programmers where your mouth is?
    • From what I've heard, this agreement was because Apple wanted to add some extras to the Swing GUI layer, such as integrating Swing menu items into the main Apple menu system.
      • Which is interesting from a historical perspective, by that I mean it tells us why Apple decided to take on the job several years ago. But it really doesn't answer the question of why the Java community isn't coming back to Sun with "look, Apple doesn't really have anything at stake here, they don't see the success of Java as important, the bastards, but whether they're bastards or not you're the ones who've got a dog in the hunt and you're the ones who've got to cover this trail."

        Alternatively, the FreeBSD
        • by ChunderDownunder ( 709234 ) on Sunday May 04, 2008 @06:01AM (#23290372)
          On licensing, the BSD port licensed its code from Sun under a different license before Java went GPL.

          At the moment, legal eagles are working through some paperwork regarding acceptance of this code into the GPL source tree. But in coming months we'll hopefully see the BSD and, by extension, Landon Fuller's OS X work hosted in the main openjdk codebase. Patience...

          Now on the other matter, the OS X Java, there have been pleadings from Java developers in the past for Sun to take the reins and do an official port. Particularly a few months ago when Leopard shipped without Java 6.

          What makes the port to OS X harder than, say, Linux? Among other things:

          * A Cocoa implementation of AWT
          * Porting the hotspot virtual machine to PPC
          * native libraries, e.g. the Java-Cocoa bridge

          These are not trivial tasks they require some expertise of OS X and PowerPC internals. If they were simple to implement, Apple wouldn't be 2 years late. For Sun to replicate these existing features from scratch would take many man years. And for 10%, or thereabouts, of the desktop market they obviously don't see a cost benefit. Would Sun be willing to 'buy back' Apple's source tree and GPL it? Some OS X internals Apple may not wish to expose (IP issues) and like Sun's codebase be encumbered by code they don't own.

          Ultimately some of the ball is in Apple's court. They have sought to maintain their own Java port for competitive reasons such as low level OS integration. But what competitive advantage they deem to have when their releases are a full version behind Linux, Solaris and Windows is debatable.

          Would Apple publish changes back to openjdk? They seem reluctant to. One benefit:

          * PowerPC hotspot - someone else can maintain legacy architecture support for the G4. Who else have a vested interest in openjdk? Redhat, who have signalled intentions to support multiple architectures besides x86. Do Apple and Redhat really compete for the same markets, aside from a few Xserves???

          • by argent ( 18001 )
            An X11 based port from Sun would work for the interim, and possibly even shame Apple into committing the resources to completing their Cocoa port. It would also produce a port that works for earlier versions of OS X.

            If they were simple to implement, Apple wouldn't be 2 years late.

            If Apple doesn't even have 1.5 working properly on Leopard, I suspect that they have other issues.

            As for Apple's possible issues with competitors... it's getting to the point where the question isn't going to be Java on OSX vs Java
    • by toriver ( 11308 )
      If you look at the Mac OS X architecture "map" you will see their JVM goes straight down to the core when needed.

      That is why.

      That platform vendors were supposed to provide the implementations for their platform themselves, with Sun acting as verification/compliance testing entity was the original idea, ref. the Sun vs. Microsoft court documents when Microsoft decided to ignore compatibility and add their own incompatible elements to their implementation despite contractual obligations.

      So, Apple making the M
      • by argent ( 18001 )
        That might have been a clever enough scheme that you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel, but it had this little problem... it didn't work. The only organization that really had a stake in making it work was Sun, and they abdicated that role, so it fell apart.

        It's just taking longer to fall apart with Apple than it did with Microsoft.
  • by gumpish ( 682245 ) on Saturday May 03, 2008 @10:15PM (#23288514) Journal
    Apple has a history of denying new versions of Java to any previous version of the OS. (See Java 5 & 10.3)

    Frankly I was amazed that Acrobat 8 Professional requires Mac OS 10.4 when it only came out 18 months after 10.4 was released. (But then perhaps Apple was paying Adobe a little bit under the table to help strongarm Mac owners into coughing up their $129 upgrade fee.) And of course Office 2008 requires 10.4 as well.

    I have a hard time believing that the OS changes so fundamentally from one version to the next that apps can't be reasonably ported. I guess the only reason legacy versions of Windows enjoy so much support is simply because of the vast amount of market share Microsoft enjoys.

    Makes me glad I use a free operating system and free software, still annoying as fuck supporting my users though.
  • I've seen a couple threads in various places complaining that with Java 6 is only on the 64-bit Intel Leopard somehow Java is still not a great platform for Macs. But I've got Java 1.4 and 1.5 on my 32-bit Mac Mini and Java apps run fine. What features are in Java 1.6 that are so critical? I heard something about applet loading being a bit more intelligent, that might be nice for client-side web apps, but is there anything else?
    • by toriver ( 11308 )
      Apart from speedups and bug fixes, 1.6 adds sripting language support, with implementations for JavaScript and Groovy if memory serves. This lets you add all the horrors of non-statically typed programming to your Java programs if you want to really shoot yourself in the foot.
    • They moved the runtime to a micro-kernel, and API has suffered some changes (java.util.concurrent.TimeUnits for example).
    • There are huge language changes with support for things like generics and autoboxing.

      Many java developers already use this in their code and it wont compile with earlier versions such as java 1.4.

      Swing is much better and multithreaded by default in java6.

      I believe the latest release of netbeans in beta will not compile without java6.
  • I use to write java code and I was considering a used macbook as a laptop back in 2006.

    Java is the most popular language in business today and it has surpassed even c and c++. WIth Windows supporting .Net and Java I decided to stick with a PC.

    Apple lost and even Linux is ahead with its must smaller marketshare because of its support for Java.

    Apple is supporting more and more proprietary standards and is making life difficult for software developers. In the end we are going to see more and more windows based

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