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J2EE Development on MacOSX

Posted by Cliff on from the coffee-and-apples dept.

RyanG asks: "So I'm looking to get a new laptop and have found myself very tempted by Apple's iBook for a variety of reasons like cost, performance, size, etc. Now I know Steve Jobs once touted the Mac/OSX as the (future) premier platform for Java development but I'm curious to know what people think of it in practice? I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who work with JSPs and Servlets."

1 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. When OS X first came out by DeadSea · · Score: 3, Insightful
    When OS X was released I was very excited because Mac users would soon be able to use my java programs. I went and tested what I had written and I was both very impressed and somewhat frustrated.

    I was impressed because almost everything that I have written that is pure java works flawlessly. The GUIs have the nice new bubbly plastic look and feel to them and life is good. This alone is enough to make we want to use OS X as my development platform.

    On the other hand I was frustrated because java programs we so hard to use. Mac OS X.1 added the ability to double click on a jar file to start a java program. Until then you had to go to the command line to start java programs. For an OS that prides itself on being GUI oriented, that is just unacceptable. There is some sort of utility to put some sort of macintosh wrapper around your java files, add and icon and make them look like a mac program. It all looks nice but it means that you will have to offer a separate mac download. That would be ok sometimes, but unfortunatly the utility is only a mac GUI program. I didn't see a way to script the process and add it to my makefile. The program also doesn't run on linux and windows which is where I do most of my builds. If there were a java port of this utility which I could run from a makefile, I would be much happier.

    The other frustration I had also dealt with lack of command line support. I wanted to open a web browser but was unable to find a command line to pop up IE. I finally found some class libraries to open a browser that were hidden (not in the classpath I might add) somewhere on the machine. Getting java to work with other programs is much easier on both Linux and Windows.

    Other than those couple nits, I really think OS X and java have a very bright future.