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J2EE Development on MacOSX
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."
If you don't like WebObjects, that's fine. Tomcat runs great on OS X (and you can find a point-n-click installer on the web), and Project Builder is a good dev environment. Besides, where else can you use photoshop, illustrator, gimp, and apache all on one box?
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A good website (and you probably already have been there) is http://developer.apple.com/java.
Here's a good overview from Apple of Developing Java Applications on OS X
Just for another point of reference though, I use the open-source Eclipse IDE on my Windows 2000 Athlon, and I love it. I'm used to developing server side Java on Windows, though. As far as I can tell, Eclipse isn't available for OS X yet. They'd have to port the SWT widget set to OS X. However, JBuilder 6 is coming out for Mac OS X, and should have the native Aqua UI.
And last, just to stoke the flames, I think a lot of the people who use Linux would benefit greatly from taking a look at Mac OS X. Go down to CompUSA or (insert-your-retailer-here) and play with the new G4 boxes. The Aqua UI will blow your mind (XP doesn't even come close).
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first off, it works really well for development. you can run any of the all java IDEs like netbeans or forte from sun or even borland's jbuilder
i've been using jbuilder4 for a while. i had a bit of a hack getting the linux version to install, but once i did, its all straight up java 2 code, so it ran fine. (i prefer jbuilder4 since its got the ability to load in the vi editor tool from sourceforge - jvi.sourceforge.net i've got tomcat 3.2.1 and 4.0 running fine on my pb, and it all works like a champ.
i've found that the java integration into osX is outstanding. apple has made it one of the languages to code full on applications for osX with. i've got a coworker who does use the apple IDE projectBuilder to do his java development, so i know its possible. i just havent done it. i use jbuilder on NT at work, so i wanted to keep the same project files.
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.