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Apple Deprecates Their JVM
Mortimer.CA writes "In some recent release notes Apple has deprecated their JVM: '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.' In the past Sun (now Oracle) has always let Apple do this: 'Apple Computer supplies their own version of Java. Use the Software Update feature (available on the Apple menu) to check that you have the most up-to-date version of Java for your Mac.' I wonder how much heads-up Oracle was given for this change, and if the Java team has any code ready to go, or whether they'll have to ramp up porting for Mac OS 10.7 (aka 'Lion')."
This dev is more concerned about Minecraft not working...
This seems like a similar move to the obsoleting of Flash. Cross platform app development was useful when Apple was struggling to compete. Now Apple doesn't see any particular need for cross platform apps, because the breadth of app types is already covered by native Cocoa apps. They won't exclude Java in the way that they excluded Flash on the iPhone. But there's no need for them to spend development time on bundling it with the OS.
Honestly, with the talk of app stores, the ridiculous talk of macbook air's being the 'future of computing', and other things from yesterdays announcements, I will be keeping my eye closely on linux for the time being. I'm not sure I'm going to stay with Apple for my next computer. They seem to be going in a direction I'm not comfortable with.
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.
Obvious reason: people aren't using the Apple-produced runtime in Mac Applications?
Applications developed in Objective-C / Cocoa are more specific to the OS X platform, providing Apple a competitive advantage when developers build their apps using Cocoa, instead of something portable like Java.
Not in Apple's best interest for Mac apps to be developed using Java.
Not only can they be run on other platforms, but Java-based apps may not conform to Apple UI design guidelines
They don't need to create an Installer, they need to create an entire port to a new operating system. The low-level threading and memory management, the GUI.. who wants their Java apps to be running under X11 on Mac?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
In the past I've heard macs referred to as the ultimate developer's machine, with a full UNIX, all the gnu tools, a nice UI (with X if you need it), and nicely integrated laptop hardware. But Java is still one of the top languages on the planet, so if Apple really stops keeping it up to date that could put a nail in that coffin. Heck, I'm pretty sure the Apple Store has a big pile of Java back there...
Apple doesn't maintain a distribution of python, but you're still able to run Python on OS X. The only thing that's really going to change is that it won't be Apple doing the work, it will be Oracle.
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I don't see much use of Java on the desktop these days (aside from a few specific applications), but I certainly see it used a lot in server environments. I suppose Apple will also apply this to OS X server? So if you want an Apple server you can't run the applications you've been running up to this point? They're going to shrink their already small server share.
Also, Slashdot, I set this account to use the "classic" interface, why are you making me click buttons to see comments now?! I just want to see the page, not have to keep clicking "show more". This comment entry box is terrible too, the "Reply" button is too close to the box itself.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
And after removing Flash and Java and publishing the "We want the web to be open" public letter Apple still requires Quicktime to watch videos on their own website. Hypocrites.
MacOS is actually based on the mach kernel, and not UNIX. /pedantic
Mac OS X is actually based on the mach kernel, which, along with OS X's userland is a certified implementation of UNIX. /pedantic
By which you mean the JVM? It has nothing to do with "internet standards" ffs.
You do know that 'Java' is to 'JavaScript' as 'car' is to 'carpet'. Beyond a few shared letters for early buzzword compliance, and things like the Rhino interpreter, there is no real relationship between the two.
All those sexy HTML5/JavaScript apps have to be written in programming languages and hosted on servers. And plenty of people are building on top of the JVM. Large chunks of both Twitter and Foursquare are written in Scala, a JVM language. Why? Oh, something about how it is good for long-running processes due to something ridiculous like a million engineer-hours going into JVM development.
If we should get rid of technology simply because it is old, let's get rid of C. No, wait, let's not. Because it is a useful and practical technology, and we should base our technical decisions on technical merit not on buzzword compliance and what appeals to Web 2.0 shiny-seekers.
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From the Mac App Store guidelines:
2.24
Apps that use deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, Rosetta) will be rejected
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Other media players will probably support HTTP Live Streaming in a couple months. It's not like it's a proprietary format or anything- it's just a continuously updating MPEG-2 file sitting on a server. Quicktime continuously checks that file for updates and downloads just the new parts when they get uploaded. I'd rather they use that than Adobe's proprietary streaming format or Real's proprietary streaming format.
Java on the Mac have always been maintained by Apple, they licensed it about fifteen years ago from Sun. There has never been a Sun Java for Macs. I don't know how much code is going back to Sun/Oracle but in worst case that may be nothing at all. The main problem is that Java by itself has no support for things like the Mac Aqua UI, that's all additions made by Apple. In the late 90's when the Mac wasn't going well Apple decided to license Java and fix those things since Sun wasn't likely to put much time and effort on it. It's actually really good and well done.
Or they looked at the Android lawsuit and said "Hmm, I don't *think* we're breaking any laws, but why take chances?" Oracle is playing a different game with Java than Sun did and personally I'd want to stay out of it as much as possible. There's lots of reasons they may have done this and with ~8 months notice Oracle has plenty of time to build their own JVM.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
And all along I thought it was because it just wasn't ready for production use.
The BSDs are still working on getting ZFS good enough to use. Everyone I knew that tried it on OS X said it was shit.
I don't think they will because I believe that Apple would rather developers use Objective-C over Java for OSX development for the very same reasons they would rather developers use Objective-C over Flash for iOS development.
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Right, but Apple does ship versions of Python and Ruby that can access their Cocoa libraries. Apple would rather all developers use Objective-C, but that's just a way of ensuring that developers use Cocoa. Using Cocoa is what they're really after, technically speaking, because their real goal is for all Mac applications to use the same toolkit, look nice and behave like other Mac applications.
I promise you Apple doesn't care if Swing applications look similar to Mac applications since they won't behave like Mac apps due to not running through Cocoa. I bet Apple would be happy if those apps just never ran on OS X. But they have in the past provided a way of using Cocoa through Java. Apparently the Mac Java developer community had enough of a clue to realize that using Cocoa is a great way to restrict your app to one platform and miss the whole point of using Java in the first place.
Apple's special JVM was really just a way of trying to sneak Java developers into Cocoa, but it never really worked, so at this point, it's probably in Apple's best interest to just provide a stock JVM so people who really want to use Java can and let Oracle worry about whether or not Swing apps look like Mac apps. In general, Swing app usability is damning enough that Apple can just leave well enough alone and their customers will want Cocoa apps or Swing apps that have been engineered to look and behave a lot like Cocoa apps anyway.
NeXT jumped on the Java bandwagon early on, porting their flagship WebObjects framework from Objective-C to Java. When Steve returned to Apple, he planned to make Java a first-class citizen of OS X. The Apple JRE had a number of enhancements over the stock one. For example, it shared classes between JVM instances, a feature that didn't appear in the Sun JRE for a few years. It also included a lot of stuff for native integration - you could make the menu bar sit at the top of the screen from Swing apps, just like a proper Mac App and use the standard Mac keyboard shortcuts, for example.
They also shipped an Objective-C to Java bridge. You could call the Cocoa APIs directly from Java programs with some low-level automatic translation letting you use Java strings and arrays instead of NSString and NSArray, for example. This was deprecated some time around 10.2 or 10.3 (I can't remember - Wikipedia probably can), largely because no one was using it. New Cocoa APIs were not added to the bridge.
The idea that Java would be one of the dominant languages for OS X development died five years ago. Apple has only continued to invest money in their JRE to help sell XServes running OS X Server and running WebObjects. I'd imagine this market is now so small that it's no longer worth bothering with.
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Why wouldn't a peripheral require a driver?
The driver is already present on the machine and available to native code, yet the Java virtual machine is not aware of it.
Magic? No, computers run on magical smoke. I know because I have seen the magical smoke come out of computers before, and after that they do not work.
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Larry and Steve are good friends. I would bet a lot of money that this is a "strategic" decision, not something in favor of customers directly.
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