Leopard serves up cold Java
I “solved” the transparent menubar problem by going through all my desktop images and removing the ones with high-contrast parts at the top from my “desktop backgrounds” iPhoto album. Complete baloney that the OS is forcing me to do that extra work — this one thing has dropped my opinion of Apple’s UI philosophy by quite a bit — but it’s done now, and I no longer have to squint at stuff like this:
Now I go to do some Java development and I see that not only has Apple still not released an official version of Java 6 after over a year of a perfectly functional preview version being available, but they actually broke the preview version on the new OS. I knew before I upgraded that Leopard didn’t ship with Java 6, but I didn’t expect my existing install to stop working.
A huge number of the Java developers I know from my consulting days migrated to Macs over the last couple years because it was such a nice Java 5 development environment, and being UNIXish it was close enough to the deployment environment to do meaningful local testing. But the broader Java world is moving on — Java 6 has been officially released for close to a year now on Windows and Linux and Solaris.
Googling around, I see that a lot of the holdup appears to be that Apple wants to fix up the GUI implementation to use the latest native libraries. That’s a fine goal, but all of the Mac-using Java developers I know are doing server-side stuff! We do not care, even a tiny little bit, what the state of Java 6’s GUI implementation is. We do care about the new language features, garbage collector improvements, and so on. I can appreciate that Apple doesn’t want to release a half-baked Java, but they could certainly release an ugly developer-only version.
I think if Apple holds off too much longer on Java 6 they are going to find an increasing number of their recent adopters switching over to Linux or Windows to avoid falling too far behind the technology curve.
January 31st, 2009 at 7:08 am
A couple of years back you had a dabble with Ubuntu.
If you get a chance you really should try the latest ‘Intrepid’ release
- very funtional and the KDE4 that is included is ideal
for those who like a polished look and feel for the desktop.
Java official source was packaged for Ubuntu many months back and
functions well.