Will The Apple Developer Community Take Over Java On Mac OS X?
For as long as I can remember, the state of the Java platform on Mac OS has been rather frustrating for developers (we started building desktop applications in Java on the Mac back in 1997/98). In some ways, Apple has always done a good job with Java, in that the applications ran pretty well. However, there is no getting away from the fact that Apple has typically been months, or even years, behind the state-of-the-art when it comes to Java.
In the early days, this was because Apple’s Mac OS 9 OS simply wasn’t up to the job of running the powerful, multi-threaded Java 2 platform; and so it wasn’t until the release of Mac OS X that running Java 2 apps on Apple became a possibility. Even after the release of Mac OS X, there was still a lag: the Java Virtual Machine is a pretty complicated animal, and porting it to Mac OS X on PowerPC was non-trivial.
Fast forward to today, and even though Apple’s current hardware is based on Intel, their Java support still lags way behind other major platforms like: Windows; Linux; and Solaris. The truth is, that in 2007, I can’t think of a good reason for Apple not to be bang up-to-date with their implementation of Java (yes, I know there have been resource contraints in some areas at Apple – I blogged about these before Apple admitted these [which caused a lively debate at the time] – so I guess this might be part of the story).
What is particularly frustrating, however, is that Apple remains totally silent on their Java strategy. When will Java 6 see a production release on MacOS X? With the Leopard release? Somtime in 2008? In 2015? Never? No-one has any idea; and Apple isn’t talking – not to developers; not to customers; not to anyone.
Now, however, the OpenJDK project is… well… open! The Java platform is moving full steam ahead to Open Source under the GPL. All of which begs the question is: will the Apple developer community decide to build their own up-to-date version of Java that runs on MacOS X? If Apple would only make their Java strategy clear, it might help the community figure out if that’s worth doing or not…
Neil’s point-free blog » Apple and Java: Stop Whinging! on 30 May 2007 at 2:45 am
[...] to say. Often I agree with him, sometimes I don’t. Today, I don’t. In his latest post he talks about the frustrations of developing in Java on Mac OS X. Incidentally this is a topic [...]