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Java 1.3.1 Available for Mac OS X

Posted by pudge on from the java-for-smart-people dept.

moofman and TheAJofOZ write in that Java 1.3.1 Update 1 is available for Mac OS X. The new release offers text, mouse, and printing improvements, as well as better overall stability and compatibility. Mac OS X 10.1.3 is a prerequisite. Get it via Software Update, or download it from Apple. For more information, check out the developer release notes.

38 comments

  1. Thank God! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As a CS student studying java right now, I tried out the cross platform ability of the language by developing on forte for windows xp and then netbeans for mac os x. Java is a dog on osx!
    I made a simple swing app that bounced a ball around a windows! So frigging slow...

    This had better be much faster!

    1. Re:Thank God! by Gropo · · Score: 0

      I think the update predominantly fixes the high-level API compatibilities rather than low-level performance. Limewire under OSX now functions properly in terms of real-time column resizing and redraw, etc. There very well might be more to the update than just this, I'm not sure. Read the ADC release doc. if you're truly curious :)

      --
      I hate Grammar Nazi's
    2. Re:Thank God! by Phlegm_iBook · · Score: 1
      I'm getting really irked by people blaming OS X for their slow graphics programs. If you knew some basic graphical algorithms and would take ten minutes to learn the architecture you would be able to take responsibility for the performance of your programs instead of blaming it on the operating enviroment.

      It's attitudes like yours that give Java a bad name because you're using the ease-of-development of the platform as a substitute for real programming ability.

    3. Re:Thank God! by sjgman9 · · Score: 1

      I just started developing on java at the beginning of the year. Thats roughly about the same time i started to work with OSZ. Im taking a java class at school, and im just starting to work with OSX.

      I like java a heck of a lot more than c++.
      I know im inexperienced. I dont deny it. I will take time to learn more stuff.

    4. Re:Thank God! by orque · · Score: 1

      Oh come on, now don't be ridiculous. The majority of slowness in Java under OS X (though it looks great), isn't in their "basic graphical algorithms" (end programmer specific), it's in the tools which we are given to work with, i.e. the Swing API. Basic things like moving between text boxes, pulling down menus, and resizing windows are all up to Apple's implementation of the JVM. Although they're doing a fantastic job, it could still be improved a lot. This has nothing to do with the end programmer fixing up their own algorithms!

  2. mozilla .9.8 by Hadlock · · Score: 2

    mozilla .9.8 seems to actually work finally under OS X...does this mean we'll see java working properly now? or will this further break mozilla's java support? (i've heard you can ue java under OS X before, but no one has written anything comprehensive suggesting it's anything simpler than brain surgury to get it to work.)

    --
    moox. for a new generation.
    1. Re:mozilla .9.8 by buzban · · Score: 1

      mozilla rocks after the update...a huge improvement on my end. ;)

  3. its about damn time... by paradesign · · Score: 1

    ...limewire started running well. Everytime i used it on a peecee it ran significantly smoother and it irked me. peecee better than my G, ha, not any more!

    --
    I want 2D games back.
  4. Correct pathname for graphics accel config by melquiades · · Score: 4, Informative

    This update apparently improves graphics hardware acceleration for Java (haven't tested it yet). It's still somewhat experimental, so you have to turn it on manually. With the new update, you specify the video cards for which you want it enabled. The release notes explain how to do this, but give the wrong path for the config file that has the names of the video cards your machine might support. The correct path seems to be:

    /Library/Java/Home/lib/glconfigurationlist.propert ies

    Curious to see if there's an improvement. Though the low-level stuff is blazingly fast on OS X, the high-level, especially Swing, has been pretty sluggish.

    1. Re:Correct pathname for graphics accel config by dhovis · · Score: 2
      I tried following the directions to enable the hardware acceleration on my iBook. I have a program that I wrote that has a table of JTextAreas that I would love to have accelerated.

      It didn't seem to work. I'm not sure if the iBook video card is supported. It is not listed in the release notes, but it is listed in the glconfigurationlist.properties file.

      If anybody gets it to work, please reply and let everyone know.

      --

      --
      The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.

    2. Re:Correct pathname for graphics accel config by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Works fine with iBook 2002 (600MHz). Text scrolling is smooth in IntelliJ IDEA when hw acceleration is enabled. You can clearly see the difference.

  5. OT: Look at the dept. ;-) by Lars+T. · · Score: 2

    Yup, no more dummies - for now ;-)

    --

    Lars T.

    To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck

  6. Re:Bad Idea by Hadlock · · Score: 1

    i know you're trolling, but i'll bite anyways. slashdot is completely configureable. you can turn on or off whatever stories you want; i turned on science, which has a new post almost every day, as does apple, but only gets 5-10 posts per article. you can do this with apple post/stories also. people who want it, will get it, and those who don't won't.

    on the other hand, this is probaly an attempt to get more reader impressions, as there's a rabid mac fanbase on the web yet, and slashdot is making an attempt to tap that potential, not to mention drag apple users into the "slashdot reality distoriton field", err, the main slashdot site. apple.slashdot.org doesn't take up much more, if any bandwidth than the normal site, and only serves to increase readership. a marketing tactic, basically. read macslash if you don't like apple.slashdot.com, they're the same thing essentially, just that one posts a story faster than the other occasionally.

    --
    moox. for a new generation.
  7. Impressive by D_Fresh · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Not because of the Java content, but because Apple has indicated that they are really dedicated to updating OS X as soon as they can, in as many areas as they can. Contrast this to the monolithic, occasionally dangerous service packs released by MS.

    Apple did have that little iTunes installer script fiasco, but even that was corrected later the same day. I'd just like to give the OS X team at Apple kudos for releasing updates on a regular basis, and showing themselves to be committed to improving OS X. If nothing else, it's fun to be the hamster pressing on the Software Update button and getting rewarded with food pellets every so often.

    --

    Was that out loud?
    1. Re:Impressive by dthable · · Score: 1

      Ever run Windows Update...there's always some little items listed under the "Critical Fix" section. I much as I dislike Windows, they did start the process of releasing often with a few big releases along the way at Windows 98.

    2. Re:Impressive by D_Fresh · · Score: 1
      Ever run Windows Update...there's always some little items listed under the "Critical Fix" section.

      That's true - I'd forgotten about Windows Update. Still, I prefer Apple's method for updating - whether they're fixing bugs or not, the spin is always on the added functionality. Critical Updates makes it sound like "If you don't download this patch, you're fscked", whereas grabbing 10.1.3 is more like "Here, take this little point release, we hope it makes your life better." The biggest difference perhaps is that Apple doesn't have that many critical fixes for security, in part because it's BSD now, but also probably due to the fact that no one is banging as hard on OS X as they are on XP. (No one gets famous finding OS X security holes, but you'll get 15 minutes and more if you find a hole in XP. :)

      --

      Was that out loud?
    3. Re:Impressive by tbmaddux · · Score: 1
      Frequent updates are nice and not neccesarily limited to MacOS X -- I found this to be true also as far back as MacOS 8.

      However, with MacOS X the installer scripts continue to be intolerant of moving applications from their default directory (typically "/Applications"). For example, I moved the "/Applications/Mail" app to "/Applications/Internet/Mail" and MacOS X 10.1.3 failed to update it properly. This has been mentioned on MacFixit as well.

      --
      Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
    4. Re:Impressive by D_Fresh · · Score: 1
      Obviously the Software Update version finder engine depends upon strict directory structures to compile a database of current applications. I don't know much about OS X's file system, but do they have anything similar to the Windows Registry, which provides a centralized database of installed apps? Does OS X have a desktop file for this?

      I wonder if breaking the dependence on specific directories for system apps would be an easy thing for them to fix or not - if they couldn't look for the app where it "should' be installed, would they just have to do a search to find it? Would that be a performance hit? Definitely a weakness of the update feature, though.

      --

      Was that out loud?
    5. Re:Impressive by DavidRavenMoon · · Score: 2, Informative
      However, with MacOS X the installer scripts continue to be intolerant of moving applications from their default directory (typically "/Applications"). For example, I moved the "/Applications/Mail" app to "/Applications/Internet/Mail" and MacOS X 10.1.3 failed to update it properly. This has been mentioned on MacFixit as well.

      This was posted on MacIntouch the other day:

      In the System 6-9 days, Apple used an installer that used a quasi-proprietary file format known as "tomes." The tome-based installers supported HFS file descriptors, so it could write over a file no matter where it was located in the hierarchy of the disk. It also treated aliases with respect.

      Starting with Mac OS X, Apple moved to a package-based installer that uses Pax as its archival format. Pax was not created by Apple; see its man page (type "man pax" in the terminal for more information). The Pax-based installation system has two big drawbacks:

      1. Pax installs files based on its path; Pax does not support the file descriptors used in HFS/HFS+. (The other Mac OS X disk format, UFS, doesn't support file descriptors.) This basically means Pax won't look to see if the item to be installed is already on the disk but in a different location.

      2. If the path specified in a Pax archive actually exists physically on the disk, then Pax will correctly follow the path and overwrite the correct files. But if that path uses any type of link (hard link, symbolic link, or System 7-style alias), then Pax will blow away the link and create a physical directory structure as specified in the archive. In other words, it will not only ignore links, but it will overwrite them.

      #1 may just be a sign of the times, since the Unix world doesn't have any real concept of file descriptors; they've been sort of a Mac-only thing. #2 is a flaw in Pax's design.

      As a consequence of both, though, until Apple comes up with a better package system, it's a bad idea to move anything that Mac OS X installs from its default place. That includes moving stuff around and making aliases; it's broken right now.

      --
      -- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
  8. nice but how about 1.4.0 by jilles · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Last year when mac os X was released there was a lot of discussion on the Javalobby about whether or not mac os X was suitable for Java development. One of the concerns raised by among others me was that Apple had been rather slow in updating their JVM in the past. Having java 1.3.1 on Mac OS X is certainly useful but considering it has been out for months on Solaris, Windows and linux it's a bit late. In addition, jdk 1.4.0 was recently released for those platforms as well so when is it going to be available on the mac? This year? Next year?

    Apple and Sun (I believe they are cooperating)need to speed up the development if they want to lure Java developers to their OS. It's a fine OS no doubt, but being able to run an up to date JVM is pretty essential if you are developing Java. Basically anything you start developing today will most likely be deployed on a jdk 1.4.x environment.

    --

    Jilles
    1. Re:nice but how about 1.4.0 by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 2

      AFAIK, this is still the situation: Sun develops the Windows and Linux JVM's entirely in-house, while Apple has to develop the Mac JVM by itself with some "cooperation" from Sun. if M$ had to develop its own JVM's ... well, never mind, it wouldn't bother. And although there's certainly some impressive OS/FS Java stuff out there (e.g. Kaffe) it still helps an awful lot that Sun does most of the work for the platform.

      I've always been puzzled by Sun's attitude toward this.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    2. Re:nice but how about 1.4.0 by blamanj · · Score: 3, Informative

      A preview of 1.4.0 will be made available at WWDC, according to Apple.

    3. Re:nice but how about 1.4.0 by dhovis · · Score: 2
      I think you are misunderstanding something.

      This was not an update to Java 1.3.1, it is an update of the MacOS X JVM, which has been running Java 1.3.1 for a while.

      Many of the bug fixes here will benefit Apple's implementation of Java 1.4. Apple has been working hard to get their JVM up to snuff and get the hardware Swing acceleration working reliably.

      Remember, too, that you cannot de-couple completely the OS and the JVM. This update required that you have the OS X 10.1.3 update already installed.

      Someone else said that Apple will have a preview version of 1.4 available at WWDC in May and I'd expect that the production version will probably be part of OS X 10.2 sometime this summer.

      --

      --
      The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.

    4. Re:nice but how about 1.4.0 by august · · Score: 1

      Just so you know, 1.3.1 has been out for months for Mac OS X too- this is just an update to it- bug fixes. 1.3.1 shipped with the os last March.

      Apple has publicly announced ( on the mrj-dev mailing list ) that they are working on 1.4, and that a preview will be available in May.

      It's also worth noting that the VM that ships with Mac OS X comes with features that 1.4 includes- such as sharing runtime resources, and graphics improvments.

      -gus

    5. Re:nice but how about 1.4.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sun's original plan was to only make the Solaris version of the JVM and have each platform vendor port it to their respective OSes.

      Then the whole Microsoft thing happened and the Linux guys couldn't get their act together, so Sun took responsibility for those platforms. Everyone else is still on their own.

  9. Re:Bad Idea by swgs · · Score: 1

    I actually wasnt trolling, i'm trying to stir some activity of some sort on this site, cause right now it's a ghost town.

    i understand what you are saying, you are right, and you made some good points, but you are talking about turning off articles on the main site. People who just read the main site wont see the Apple articles, because in order to see the apple articles, you have to go to a seperate site. Why dont they have a seperate site for Windows news? i dont get it. Why cant it all be under the main site?

    I'll understand if this gets modded down, but my intention isnt to be a troll or to be "flamebait".

  10. excel printing by bromike666 · · Score: 1

    fyi, this update has solved all the problems that i was having printing from excel. i had re installed drives, re selected printers and anything else you could think of with no improvement. after this update excel for x prints like a dream

  11. Another link by Adam+Taro · · Score: 1
    The Developer Tools Update that accompanies this Java release are also available at Apple's site. It's a 10.5MB download. Cut from the website:
    About Java 1.3.1 Update 1 Developer Tools

    This version of the Java Developer Tools contains updates to documentation, templates, examples, and tools from previous releases.

    For detailed documentation, see http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/java/

    Requirements
    This Java update requires Mac OS X version 10.1.3 and the Java 1.3.1 Update 1. The December 2001 Developer Tools should also be installed before running this update.
  12. Your questions about 1.4 answered by melquiades · · Score: 3, Informative

    A lot of us are wondering about 1.4. Some time ago, Allen Denison of Apple posted this message on Apple's Java-dev list which answers a lot of your concerns.

    The short: they are prioritizing getting it right over getting it fast, but closing the release gap between Sun's and Apple's Java updates is a major goal for Apple. They are actively working on 1.4, and general speculation is that it will be available Q2.

    And yes, as numerous others have pointed out, 1.3.1 has been out for OS X for about five months. This is just a patch to 1.3.1.

    1. Re:Your questions about 1.4 answered by jilles · · Score: 2

      Good, I was misinformed. So what's the fuss about here on slasdot?

      --

      Jilles
    2. Re:Your questions about 1.4 answered by nether · · Score: 1

      Well ... because it's /. :)

      __nether

  13. Learn the facts! by Offwhite98 · · Score: 1

    Ok, before this new update the Java Runtime was already at 1.3.1. This update just made that faster and more stable in some areas. It is my guess that Apple will also have 1.4 coming out around the time MacOS 10.2 is released.

    That said, I am running Netbeans to do Java development on my white iBook and it works great. With this new update it makes it much more reasonable in terms of speed and responsiveness. And I am glad to have an alternative to Windows for Java.

    As for applications being released for Java 1.4, that is just stupid. It just came out and there surely will not be applications already based on 1.4. Most will safely lag behind at 1.3.1 where it is stable while 1.4 becomes more established. It also takes time for developers to take advantage of the new features in 1.4. From what I read of your post, you do not understand the nature of software development.

    Being the most up to date with the latest Java spec is not always an advantage for an application. Often is bases it on a loose foundation which is not proven. And from what I have seen of 1.4, it just integrated several Java frameworks which you can simply include as Jar files with 1.3.1 level applications. Nothing will keep someone from deploying an application with the same abilities to a 1.4 vs a 1.3.1 level runtime.

    --
    Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
  14. IntelliJ IDEA Broken!! by pik0 · · Score: 0

    Argggghhhgghhh!!!!!

    IDEA is severly handicapped as a result of this update. I can no longer select tabs across the top of the window to change source listings.

    When selecting a block of text, the highlighted text is about 3 lines below where my cursor is as I select. BLECH!!!!

    On a machine with an external monitor, where the monitor is situated above the internal monitor, and the menu bar is on the internal monitor, a Java window can not be dragged to sit above the menu bar line!!!
    Holy crap!!!! Didn't they test this?!?!?!!??

    How to I uninstall Update 1?!?!?!?!!?

    Pik0

  15. But when will we see... by Penx · · Score: 1

    ..Java3D?

  16. info about 1.4 by deander2 · · Score: 2

    If you look in the known issues section here (http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/java/ReleaseN otes/java131update1/OpenBugs/index.html), you'll notice this:

    Workaround: There currently is none. This issue should be addressed with JDK1.4's support for headless operation.

    in more than one of the bug reports. If they're putting off fixes until the 1.4 release, then 1.4 must not be that far off, and this will be the last 1.3.x release.

    All I can say is, WOOHOO!!! :-)

    --
    http://kered.org
  17. Cocoa-Java ? by peperone · · Score: 1

    Does this update include any improvements for Cocoa-Java?

    peperone

    PS: I don't need Objective-C evangelists preaching to me right now.

  18. Re:Bad Idea by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 1
    i think this new apple.slashdot.org site is a bad idea


    I like it. It doesn't mean that no Apple stories appear on the main page - some of them still do, and probably just as many as appeared before. It just means that we also get those stories that don't merit the main page.