Comments on: No Java 6 Yet In Leopard - Developers Freaking Out

By: iPhone Software » Blog Archive » Java 6 Developer preview now available for Leopard

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:02:41 +0000

[...] may recall, in the immediate aftermath of Leopard’s release, Java developers were a little upset about the exclusion of Java 6 from the shipping release of Apple’s latest operating system. [...]

By: Java 6 Developer preview now available for Leopard « outaTiME

Java 6 Developer preview now available for Leopard « outaTiME — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:19:37 +0000

By: simon

simon — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 07:36:32 +0000

I don’t know what the threads are that people say are being pulled. I imagine they were threads like - Why has the Java 6 developer preview disappeared or No Java 6 in Leopard - when will it be released?. I think those would fall into the category of “FAQ”; rather than “speculative noise” And, as for resourcing not being an issue… the mythical man month notwithstanding, given that Apple has never shipped their Java in anything like a timely fashion, and given that Leopard is so late, and so buggy, is because of lack of people, I think it’s pretty likely that the Apple Java team needs more people.

By: Mr X

Mr X — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:03:33 +0000

Apple are very hot on keeping their mailing lists high signal to noise and will take action on what they think is off topic - starting with a reminder. Bottom line this sort of speculative noise is out of place on lists which are a communication channel between developers and Apple engineers.

Wouldn’t pull it past them to pull it - but the bottom line is, as I’ve said before, it only makes sense if they have an alternative ( which they may secretly be working on ). Can’t see it being a lack of resources problem - not these days.

By: simon

simon — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:54:44 +0000

You might well be right about it being newcomers to the Mac doing the freaking out. It’s hard to believe that anyone that’s been involved with Java on Mac for any length of time would have got upset like this. Having said that, there have been reports of Apple people deleting threads about Java 6 on the developer forums - people often get heated about behaviour like that.

By: Mr X

Mr X — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:13:12 +0000

It’s mostly new comers to the Mac platform that are freaking out - they are used to seeing roadmaps and interpret silence as indifference- the old hands on the java-dev lists are more sanguine - being used to (if not happy) Apple’s (insanely) great secrecy.

On your earlier point of shipping Leopard, not because it was ready, but because they felt they had to - right on the money - there are serious known bugs in Leopard - however, most consumers won’t notice and they are working on the fixes.

Same thing happened on Tiger.

I’d classify Leopard as a great consumer release but not a great enterprise release - in particular they have made lots of changes to the server product - it probably wouldn’t be wise to deploy that until maybe 10.5.3

Java support is only one small part of that picture.

By: Asam Bashir

Asam Bashir — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 01:21:52 +0000

The Java developer market is not something Apple is clearly aiming for right now, there is something in development that clearly has priorities at the moment, but that doesn’t mean Apple won’t update to Java 6. Whatever it’s doing right now means that Java has to wait. A lot has changed in the GUI and deep technologies in Leopard, and in order for Java 6 to take advantage of these features requires time and now must fit in with plans for Mac OS X 10.6…..

By: simon

simon — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 22:34:35 +0000

Asam, I agree that lack of immediate availability of Java 6 will have little effect on take-up of Leopard. Clearly, software developers are a small subset of the total number of users of Apple, or any other hardware/OS platform.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by “Java GUI monstrosities” though. As Mr X said, Apple have pretty worked hard to ensure that Java apps can look and behave like native Mac OS X apps. Also not sure what you mean by “Java apps are rubbish”. What make you believe that Java apps are rubbish, in particular, compared to apps written with other languages? I hope it’s nothing that Steve Jobs said… he seems entirely clueless when it comes to software development technology (judging from the remarks I’ve heard him make about SDKs, Java, Web 2.0 etc. etc.)

By: Asam Bashir

Asam Bashir — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:05:41 +0000

Mac users aren’t really bothered, Java apps are rubish anyway - Mac marketshare growing and probably enough momentum now to keep going, as the share price shows. So what, a few Java developers get their knickers in a twist becuase they’re too dumb to set up VMs - for most Mac users it’s a zero issue, probably we’re glad in a way as we won’t be reliant on hidious Java GUI monstrosities. Will not having Java 6 affect takeup on Leopard, I don’t think so…..

By: simon

simon — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:36:30 +0000

I think it would be amazing if Apple completely dropped Java on Mac OS X. There’s not really any evidence, yet, to suggest that their timelines are much worse than they’ve been historically.

In any case, it looks like the management team felt they *had* to ship Leopard now, whatever state it was in. I’d expect a whole bunch of updates, plus at least a new developer Java 6 preview, during the next few weeks as they sort out some of the issues.