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')."

Comments

Re:Mac as ultimate dev machine no more?

[ceejayoz]

This dev is more concerned about Minecraft not working...

Java banned from the Mac App store...

[recoiledsnake]

From the Mac App Store guidelines:

2.24

        Apps that use deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, Rosetta) will be rejected

Re:So they are dropping another tech

[DrgnDancer]

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.

Re:Plenty of heads up.

[TheRaven64]

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.