« How To Choose A Java... | Main | GlassFish, WebLogic... »

Steve Jobs At JavaOne, Mac OS X and Java

Scott McNealy and Steve Jobs at JavaOne. "...One of the big surprises was the presence of the venerable Steve Jobs. Jobs underscored the commitment by Apple Computer to ship the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) with their upcoming MacOS X release later this year.
This is great news for Mac users and Java developers alike. The Mac has always supported Java, but full support for the latest versions lagged that of Windows, Solaris, and even Linux. It is about time that both Sun and Apple put serious effort into porting Java to the Mac. Hopefully, they will work together and help each other in the process. The demo of a pre-release version of Java 2 for MacOS X was impressive. There were a few glitches, but the demo got it's point across: Java runs well on the Mac and will take full advantage of the upcoming Aqua user interface..." [from developer.com]

It was JavaOne 2000. Exactly ten years later we got: "As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the version of Java that is ported by Apple, and that ships with Mac OS X, is deprecated. This means that the Apple-produced runtime will not be maintained at the same level, and may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X. The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained through the standard support cycles of those products."

Comments:

What does this mean for Glassfish? Is it actually a disadvantage (in general) if I test my application running on Glassfish on MacOS, since the supported Java version lags one version behind and is different from the one the application will run in production?

Regards,
Pete

Posted by Pete on October 23, 2010 at 09:25 PM CEST #

@Pete,

I guess you are not running your Glassfish in production on MacOS X and the same hardware. So you will have to test it. (even if both environments were identical, you had to).
Apple released last week the newest JDK 1.6 - so we have enough time until JDK 1.7 release to search for port...

- enjoy hacking!,

adam

Posted by adam-bien.com on October 23, 2010 at 10:48 PM CEST #

The Mac has a 20% retail market share in the US right now. So Apple feels strong enough to force Oracle to port Java for Mac... I already found it a strange move by Sun to support Linux but not Mac.

So that's just a reasonable business decision... but still I feel a little uneasy - will Apple play the same game of arrogance that almost killed them several times before?

just my 2¢
Rüdiger

Posted by Rüdiger on October 25, 2010 at 12:26 PM CEST #

That is great that you found those quotes, and photo. It is a potentially disruptive situation that we find ourselves in. OpenJDK (Intel x86/x64) compiles relatively painlessly on Mac. The major problem is in the graphics layer. The currently working version uses X11 on Mac.

My hope is that Oracle can talk Steve Jobs into contributing the required libraries to OpenJDK to run Java with Aqua on Mac, or there will need to be major L&F developments to make it look native like it currently does.

John

Posted by John Yeary on October 25, 2010 at 04:59 PM CEST #

Check your facts: The Mac does not have anywhere close to 20% market share. I think you're referring to when Jobs said that 20% of new PCs sold in a single quarter were Macs.... that it an entirely different thing.

Mac market share is really more like 5% worldwide, which is not enough for Oracle to probably care about. Jobs is forcing people to choose between Java and the Mac. I use a Mac by choice because it used to be a good platform for Java, but since I make my living writing Java, it's going to be an easy choice to dump Apple.

Posted by Eric Lieber on October 25, 2010 at 06:47 PM CEST #

@John,

or something like that: http://www.adam-bien.com/roller/abien/entry/jdk_java_7_on_mac

could work. It would be a nice startup :-)

For me it would be o.k. to run the IDE in X-mode (in the beginning :-)). It is not nice, but it works.

thanks!,

adam

Posted by adam-bien.com on October 25, 2010 at 10:15 PM CEST #

btw. it is "highly" important that Java get a fast and working standard 3d framework, where 2d is seamless integrated as subset and all that consistently working with a concurrency/multicore framework (meaning: also gpu support) ...

fx should then be an api on top of this ...

3d as general perspective, 2d as subset (top-down), not on the contrary! same with multicore ...

this would then be a good piece of standardization on mac, linux and windows ... and not to mention the requirements of the upcoming 3d-web standards ...

at the moment swing, javafx, several proprietary 3d solutions ... stupid double structures, lack of compatibility and and and ...

Posted by michael polasek on November 15, 2010 at 09:10 PM CET #