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Gosling Reacts To Apple's Java Deprecation
Kurofuneparry writes "Apple has announced that Java is deprecated as of the most recent update to OS X. This shot across the bow is getting some responses. To Jobs' claim that 'Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms,' James Gosling is quoted as saying that 'simply isn't true.' Much talk of a coming turf war is to be had. This certainly can't be unrelated to statements from Jobs recently covered on this website and is sure to make waves. Apple has enjoyed significant success recently accompanied by a widespread sense that they can do no wrong in business or design. However, is deprecating Java a mistake? It doesn't take much insight to connect the dots and see that Apple has starting marking friends and enemies relative to the increasingly heated fight for mobile and other platforms."
Overly-dramatic summary aside, isn't this just because the cost for Apple to support Java on OS X is greater than the benefit it provides?
at least link to the corresponding blog:
http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/steve_jobs_comments_on_apple
The side-effects are that Java developers won't use Macs. (Since I use neither Java nor Apple products, I don't really care that mcuh, but I think Apple might be shooting itself in the foot.)
Of much more concern is the App store for Mac OS X idea. Apple is turning Mac OS X into a closed iPhone-like system. I guess my anti-Apple rant will soon apply to Mac OS X as well as the iP* systems.
The mistake isn't necessarily deprecating Java, if that is the way forward then that is the way forward. The big mistake is deprecating it without ANY concrete plans on a way forward. Corporate types hate uncertainty and Apple fails to realize this it seems. I mean we don't even know if Oracle will provide a JVM for mac, and if they do what will become of the Apple-specific technologies(such as launching with the Java application stub, using Cocoa instead of X, the Apple specific Java extensions etc.)
Where I work we use a lot of Apple Java and now we have absolutely 0 idea on whether we should invest any more in Apple at all. Buying new hardware and transitioning to a new platform is expensive, but at least the other major platforms(Windows and Linux) do at least provide some certainty as to the future of those products and the platforms they will support.
Basically Steve is treating major software platform updates the same we he treats iMac hardware updates, and that just doesn't sit well with a lot of people.
Monstar L
It seems to have become trendy again to hate Apple no matter what, but this is getting ridiculous. Why is it that Apple is expected to be the only platform vendor that has to maintain their own version of the JVM for free? Jobs is quite correct in saying that Java under OS X has long lagged behind the latest official Sun release. I wish it was more common for Apple to leave more components to third parties now that they've got more market share. Another example would be graphics drivers, which lag tremendously in both performance and features. I don't understand why on Earth any Java dev would want to be stuck indefinitely with Apple's outdated implementation that by definition would never be a major priority rather then get a version from the main organization behind it. For that matter I blame Sun's longstanding ambivalence toasted FOSS. If we had a fully open GPL edition of the JVM that was best of class like we should have gotten years ago, this never would have been an issue in the first place. It's yet another tech Sun's BS has screwed us on, with their insistance to out ZFS under the CDDL rather then Apache/BSD/LGPL being another major example. Anyone still have that old sun strategy wheel, from before 'acquisition' became their final exit?
No Eclipse, which is used in a vast number of development tools (including non-Java ones), especially for embedded systems. No NeoOffice, which (at least last time I used OSX, which was admittedly a LONG time ago) is the only way to make OpenOffice on the Mac usable. And plenty of business applications are in Java, either as applets or standalone applications - they'll break too.
Ordinarily, their would be praise in the streets for Apple "deprecating" Java. They've done a consistently late and shitty job of keeping their port up to date, with only the benefit of having it be part of "system update" to show for it.
Given that their marketshare has grown, and Sun/Oracle does a decent and/or better than Apple did job of keeping it updated for other supported platforms, it seems likely that support will actually improve.
However, in the case of Apple, it isn't hard (or, typically, incorrect) to view anything that they do as being in service of their single-vendor-golden-cage control freak ideology. On the mobile, it is cryptographically enforced. On the desktop, the intent seems fairly clear to start with the soft sell "The Apple Store isn't the only way, just the best one" saith Jobs, and abrupt terminations of distribution of 3rd party technology are likely part of that.
Server/corporate users of OSX, rare but not nonexistent beasts, should be celebrating right now, since they'll now have actual Java, not Apple half-assery; but it is also likely the case that this is an attempt to make java an even more obscure and peripheral aspect of the OSX experience in general(in the same way that x11 is available; but is considered about as "un-Apple" as firing up Parallels, and probably less common).
I kinda summed up the consequences, OK i was pessimistic but I also had forgotten apple used to have offerings in the server market. A server that can't do tomcat natively? hmmmm.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Microsoft has never supported a JVM for Windows in the first place; at most, Apple is now in the same position, not worse. Besides not having a control of the market like MS does.
I'm not an Apple apologist, but it's not comparable at all.
Dilbert RSS feed
There seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread so let me make this as clear as I can - Apple isn't blocking Sun/Oracle's ability to ship Java for the OS X platform, what they're doing is dropping internal maintenance for the platform from within Apple themselves. Up until now Apple has been porting Java to the OS X platform, and they're now discontinuing that and consequently removing it from their update system.
If someone else, including Sun/Oracle want to start maintaining a Java for OS X release they absolutely can - it just won't be available via OS X's automatic update scheme any longer (and won't be something Apple is paying for).
There are still open source equivalents of the JVM such as SoyLatte and the like. Plus, I really don't believe Gosling on this. I imagine we will be seeing an Oracle branded JVM for the mac in the next year or so. The apple audience is just too big to ignore. It won't have first class citizenship like it used to have with the OS, but then again, Apple has been gradually pushing Java to the side. Java updates have always been incredibly slow for the mac and trying to make a Java app look native takes a tremendous amount of work that sort of goes against the spirit of Java and also creates compile headaches.
Open-source JVM's on OSX are highly incomplete and typically use X11. This is not ideal behavior, at all.
Then Oracle should get right on that if they want to truly be a common platform for all OS.
This is not a big deal really.
Software developers aren't really all that important to Apple market share anymore as they have been moving toward becoming more of a source for trendy tech gadgets rather than a major force in computer driven software for some time now. They intend to phase out of computers completely as there is more money to be made with iPhones, toy tablets and other trendy gizmos. They see no future in the business world of databases, web-development and science-based applications, but rather in the end-user market phone, games and entertainment space. Apple intends not to compete with Microsoft or Linux. With OS X, their primary targets are increasingly Sony, Nitendo, Nokia, Samsung and the like.
Lets face it modern American youth are really no longer receiving the kind of educations that they would need to remain current in the computer-tech world. Jobs is just adapting to market realities and the fact he has a captive market of folks who recognize that they can't really be "cool" unless they buy Apple products.
Huh? What history are you reading from? Microsoft very much did have their own JVM implementation for many years, then Sun started anti-trust litigation against Microsoft regarding it. Sometime in 2001, Microsoft settled and agreed to stop distributing it.
Basically, Sun never supported Java on the Mac, Apple did. Apple provided the developers, the tools, apple did all the work, and then paid Sun for the privilege. (it costs money to make sure your JVM was approved).
With oracle now suing every other Java implementation out there that wasn't approved Apple probably thought it just wasn't worth it. Expensive to do, costs money to do it, and unless your sending money up to oracle yearly, now a patent nightmare mess.
Look at it this way a side effect might be that Oracle stops suing non oracle approved JVM's, including Davik. The Bad press might be more than they realize.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
There are perfectly fine versions of both LibreOffice and indeed OpenOffice.org for the Mac, and many people haven't used NeoOffice in an age (and I don't think it depends on Java anymore anyway). Whatever the consequences of Jobs ditching Java might be (and I assert they are significant) they don't include a threat to open source office productivity apps.
I think Gosling is correct.
Why would Oracle care to port JVM/JDK to Mac on their own, especially now, when so many developers that used to work on Java are gone from Sun/Oracle after the buyout deal?
Actually Oracle doesn't care about Mac platform, it cares about its money making business - databases, ERP software etc. and what percentage of that runs on any Mac server exactly?
The only single reason for Oracle to care is to try and preserve more Java developers, which they probably do care about, because so many of their own products use Java. But do they really care about developers on Macs? I don't see it.
You can't handle the truth.
The issue here isn't Java itself but the fact that this is a prelude to treating Java applications like some sort of pariah by being excluded from the "Mac Store" and being excluded from Apple's new answer to apt-get.
This is about treating Java-in-general as a second class citizen on MacOS.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's too bad; Macs really caught on at my workplace since OS-X was released. Our software targets Windows and Linux, but since we're mainly a java shop developers can run Macs on their desktops if they like, and since OS-X. almost half of them have chosen to do so; they all have 8-core power macs with 8 gigs of RAM etc. If java doesn't keep up on the Mac, OS-X won't be a viable option for us any more.
Except Davik is not a JVM. You can't download java *.class file and run it on Davik.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
This is about treating Java-in-general as a second class citizen on MacOS.
It is and has for a long time been a second-class citizen on Mac OS X. I can think of no major (or even many minor) applications for the OS X platform that are written in Java. It hasn't proven itself necessary. It's costly and difficult for Apple to maintain for no tangible benefit when they can simply provide the hooks for the actual owner of Java to implement their own package if they so desire.
Where's the beef?
It's a Unix system - I know this.
Hardly. This is a move to crush anyone that wants to use Java to build a cross platform "app" that would work on Blackberrys, windows, linux, iphones, osx, etc. Apple was officially licenced to produce their own JVM. To say they were worried about a lawsuit is horribly naive. Apple is an evil, exclusive company that has forever been secretly trying to go 1984 all over the personal computing industry. Once again their true colors are showing.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I develop Java on Windows quite well thank you. Yes there was a dust up, when MIcrosoft tied to grab a hold of the language through proprietary VM, but they lost that suit and Windows remains a great platform for Java development and likely to stay that way, otherwise many customers like me will simply migrate to Ubuntu or another system capable of running Java, which would further erode Windows market share, particularly in the business applications market.
Thats why Apple wants to kill Java. They don't believe in end-users having that kind of choice. For them software and computer gadgets are all about closed and captive, rather than open markets. Just check out the dearth of really useful, but incredibly expensive stuff in the iPhone apps market that only do things that are Apple-approved. For many end users thats fine as they just want a cool app or gadget that works. They have no real technical understanding beyond pressing "buttons". They do other things with their lives.
Apple has become the trendy tech for the non-technical. Apple sees their market there rather than in general purpose computer manufacturing. Its a good move for Jobs. In his lifetime, things are likely to pretty much stay that way. For people who expand the boundaries of what you can do with computing technology Apple is becoming a closed, shrinking market, except for those developing games and trendy gizmo, entertainment software. For them in the long run Apple is increasingly becoming a dead market for significant technical innovation. For folks who are primarily interested in web-centric technical computing, Apple is really longer "cool" and really has no future, which is not the same thing as saying they won't have a sizable market or profits for some time to come. Look at Sony and Nintendo, they are still making money, but no one would claim they serve as development platforms for innovate software other than games and video entertainment.
Don't you anticipate that Oracle will start shipping java for OS X? I mean, really.
The reasoning SJ gave for dropping it though was precicely that it wasn't keeping up – if apple maintain it, it's constantly one version behind as they get the new source and patch it into their JVM... If oracle do it, it stays nice and up to date all the time.
You an run the core product, but only a few of the modules that really provide the power to the OO platform, like highly integrated database-document interaction. But the vast majority of Apple users generally don't have those kinds of technical skills anyway.
Open office is a basically a business application designed to serve as an open alternative to the basic Microsoft suite of business products. Apple sees its future in the trendy gadget, cool phones and vido-games markets, not in general technical/business computing. As a percentage of their sales, developers are just a tiny fraction of their user-base, so why go through the extra expense of catering to them, when you can develop a closed-shop end-user general consumer market instead?
Yes they do because many of their enterprise Java GUI products run on Mac. They've also made a major commitment to JavaFX 2.0, and ignoring 20% of the desktop market would make no sense to them.
The question is whether Apple will give them their OS X Swing implementation, or whether Oracle will have to write it themselves.
This space left intentionally blank.
That's it!
Make a service called Bleeter! "The Voice of the Sheep!" You can get modded if other Sheep like your Bleet!
Maybe we can get Yasmine Bleeth to advertise for it.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The side-effects of course are that Apple users will no longer enjoy the benefits of attractive looking, quick starting, super fast applications that run (at least) 500% faster than their C++ or even hand-crafted assembler counterparts. It's all due to the latest clever 'Just-in-time' JVMs that are to be released any centu^H^H^H^H^H day now... they'll be able to dynamically compile and optimise the program in the background, without any performance impact what-so-ever.
Apple code quality will also likely suffer, as programmers are forced to move from modern 'type-safe' languages like Java (except for that bit where you have to cast from Object to your desired type every few lines) that strongly enforce modern techniques like exceptions (except that bit where people just catch them and do nothing) to dead languages such as C++ that have all manner of dangerous features like unsigned types.
Thus... Macs as a platform? Unlikely to last another couple of years
Honestly ... if you're so paranoid, don't buy Apple products. Or don't upgrade. Problem solved. But as a former Java developer who worked exclusively on a mac ... I can say that the Apple has slowly been distancing themselves from Java for awhile now. The fact that it took them two goddamn years to release Java6 was pretty telling and when they did release it, it was only for 64bit machines. It was truly maddening, especially considering how opaque apple can be.
But this fear of lockdown? That's just traffic driving sensationalism. And if it isn't ... if we do reach a day when you can't install an application on your macbook without apple's permission then that will be the day OSX itself becomes deprecated. That will probably be the year of the Linux desktop. Go knows, I wouldn't stick around.
I don't think you are using the word "deprecated" correctly. I think you mean "obsolete" or "old", but not "deprecated".
Objective-C is not deprecated because neither Apple nor its original developers have deprecated it. Deprecation is the act of marking a software as having been superseded, and recommended that its use be avoided. It requires an agency to have denoted it so. Whereas "obsolete" is simply an adjective that does not require an agency.
If you tried to develop native apps using the current default Apple setup, you'd realize it's hardly ideal as well. And by way, the open source JVMs are not as incomplete as you imagine, considering they are being used by the majority of Disney's internet engineering team to develop the infrastructure. I'm speaking of SoyLatte in particuliar)
Apparently you can translate them though and they'll "run".
They didn't make their own JVM, it's HotSpot.
The side-effects are that Java developers won't use Macs. (Since I use neither Java nor Apple products, I don't really care that mcuh, but I think Apple might be shooting itself in the foot.)
Of much more concern is the App store for Mac OS X idea. Apple is turning Mac OS X into a closed iPhone-like system. I guess my anti-Apple rant will soon apply to Mac OS X as well as the iP* systems.
Keep ranting. Nobody gives a shit.
Users want to be able to install apps with one click and have them just work, whether they are native apps or Web apps. Apple has done a ton of work to enable that on both their own Cocoa platform and the common HTML5 platform, which they have done at least as much as anybody else to realize. Apps that depend on Flash or Java don't fit this model. Not only are there various versions of the runtimes which may or may not run the app you're trying to use, and not only are there various security issues that come up regularly, the user is expected to play I-T guy and sort that all out.
If you are a Java developer, you can run Java on your own server and provide an HTML5 interface on the client, or a Cocoa interface on Apple platforms. That is how Apple themselves use Java. Cocoa and HTML5 both have auto installs and auto updates built-in, and are therefore consistent with consumer use. Whatever is on the server can be as nerdy as you like, but what is on the client has to be consumer grade. Flash and Java are not consumer grade.
Understand that Apple makes consumer products. Would you expect a TV or DVD Player to have Flash and Java and expect the user to update them regularly? That is insanity. So you're not going to have those runtimes on iPads and MacBooks either. These devices don't have I-T support people. The users don't know what Flash or Java is.
So you missed the point entirely. Apple's App Stores are not about being closed, they are about working for consumers 100% of the time with absolutely zero I-T work. Apple makes very, very little money from App Store. The incentive is not to close it, but rather to make it work perfectly. Same with Apple's Web app platform, which is 100% open it's pure W3C HTML5 and ISO MPEG-4 media so that it works 100% of the time for consumers with zero I-T work. You don't need various browsers you switch to for some sites, you don't need to update your Flash or Java, you don't need to download codecs, the one in your GPU is the only one you need. Flash and Java don't make the cut in consumer computing. Blaming Apple for that is just denialism, a way to put your nerd head in the sand and wish the clock would turn back.
they all have 8-core power macs with 8 gigs of RAM etc. If java doesn't keep up on the Mac, OS-X won't be a viable option for us any more.
But those are only the minimum system requirements to run java!
I know of one significant difference between the jvm: I made a scheme interpreter in java for a BSc project and when my interpreter ran on a mac I could evaluate 10000!, it would take a long time but I would finally have a result but on a pc or linux or even a SUN server it crashed around 4000! with a stack overflow. This difference was caused by the JVM, the one on from apple would optimized tail call recursive JITed methods into loop. The one from SUN would not....
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Apple has made PLENTY of bad design decisions. Plenty of lists: here, here, etc.
-- Barbie
nope, in 1995 or 1998 MS Java was bundled with the os. The SUN vs MSFT lawsuit was the result of the half-assed bundling.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
This is about treating Java-in-general as a second class citizen on MacOS.
It is and has for a long time been a second-class citizen on Mac OS X.
Java has been third-class for a LONG time, on pretty much every platform. Even flash gets WAY more attention.
You could remove Java from most people's PCs and the only side effect would be more disk space.
And on that "universal" platform known as the web browser? When's the last time you used a java applet? Is anyone who doesn't live in mom's basement even writing them any more?
-- Barbie
And by way, the open source JVMs are not as incomplete as you imagine, considering they are being used by the majority of Disney's internet engineering team to develop the infrastructure.
It depends on whether they're doing the GUI parts. The non-GUI parts of Java are relatively easy to keep in synch, as OSX looks enormously like other Unixes. But the GUI parts are difficult, as the OSX GUI model is quite different to that used in both classic Unix/X11 and Windows. That wouldn't be a problem for an internet engineering team - GUIs aren't needed for doing servers - but it does mean that the incompleteness is likely to be patchy; some apps will be much more heavily affected than others (and GUI apps will probably bear the brunt).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
It's amazing how much of the geek community is completely at a loss for why Apple is so successful. Somehow it's impossible that the user experience they provide is what people want so it must be their marketing.
Apple and various others these days seem to be teaming up with Microsoft to attack their common 'threats'. So you see Facebook and MS going after Google, Oracle going after Android (to the benefit of Apple, and incidently MS), Apple ditching Flash (to the benefit of MS and Silverlight). And now Apple ditching Java. Who benefits from that? Well, anybody that's threatened by truly cross-platform stuff.
Here's where my paranoia kicks in. I think Apple only hates cross-platform stuff when one of those platforms is Linux. For all the talk about Microsoft being afraid of Linux, Apple actually has more to fear. Microsoft's various lock-ins are pretty secure, but Apple doesn't really have any lock-in beyond customer loyalty. If you're not locked in to Windows, then you're more or less equally able to use OS/X or Linux. That's why Linux's market share is pretty much comparable to Apple's. What's good for Linux is ultimately good for Apple, in that it helps break down Windows lock-in. But Jobs may be either short-sighted or cocky enough to ignore that. He's learned to 'succeed' in Microsoft's shadow, and maybe he's grown comfortable there.
Meanwhile, Apple has deals with Microsoft to produce versions of most of MS's stuff for the Mac, including Office and .NET. And .NET and Silverlight is where MS wants to go for its next generation of lock-in. Apple, in ditching Java and Flash, is making Silverlight seem more cross-platform than either of the others, since Linux success aside, Windows and Mac are the 'only' desktop OS's the general public is aware of (it was lots of fun seeing KDE as the standard desktop in 'The Social Network', though). So is Apple doing Microsoft's bidding, or are they just fighting for their survival. No matter, whichever way, Microsoft comes out the winner. Oracle had better pay attention to this stuff and produce a first-class OS/X Java port themselves (and lay off of Android while they're at it). Otherwise, they're unwittingly helping a little software company with its own sights on Oracle's core database business...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Solaris of course.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I bet you could get a patent on a combination of a blog post and a one-line status. I bet it would work too. A tweet that you can click on and turn into a full blog post. Surely it's no different from clicking on the summary of an RSS feed, but the patent office won't know that.
Hmmmm.... installing Linux on my shiny new MacBook Pro that work gave is starting to become more and more attractive.
I agree with a lot of others on this. My group (at a fortune 500 company) has recently started allowing engineers to use Macs and many have chosen to do so. Many other groups in our company have been opting for macs as well.
It's disappointing to see Apple hyper focus on shiny gizmos. One risk they are taking is that the cloud computing revolution hasn't fully panned out yet. If they have all of their eggs in one basket with the mobile devices and some killer apps in the cloud come out that eat into that market share somehow, then they'll be screwed.
However, a more likely scenario is that Apple has been enjoying a lead in the gizmo arena because they've been the first to do it "right" from the consumer's point of view. Unless they can keep innovating to keep ahead of the market catching up with them so that they are viewed is "The" device, they risk losing their market share to the ubiquity of other high-quality devices. Which is why they are so adamant about things like exclusivity and closed platforms.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Apple has maintained Java on Mac for the last 15 years. I don't know if that's because Sun didn't do it or because Apple did it anyways. Chicken and egg problem. Now Apple isn't removing Java, merely no longer providing new JVMs and updates. You can look at the move by Apple in two ways:
These two reasons are not mutually exclusive. For the most part, the existing JVM and updates will work for a while. The basic functionality of Java is there but there may be obscure bugs that need to be addressed. I would guess that this is okay for 98% of people who use Java on Macs.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Save this post. It is the first legitimate use of over 9000!
anon
If they don't care about OSX then why do they release their database server for it?
Nah, shouldn't be that hard. As far as I know the OSX-ification of the Java UI is done via an implementation of a PLAF (Pluggable Look and Feel). In that respect Swing is well designed.
You could evaluate it using the Windows or Linux VM, but you'd have to use -Xss.
You are delusional if you believe Apple's ditching Flash is a sign of its supporting Silverlight.
blog
You mean like phonegap(http://www.phonegap.com/) or jqtouch(http://jqtouch.com/)? Both of which are approved for use in the applications in the App Store?
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Do you know what Scheme is?
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Really now, stop it with the FUD. Just one of those CPUs costs 568.58 - $683.66 CAD so you are looking at 1100-1300 for the CPUs alone then add the price of 8GB of ram, a 1TB SATA drive, Two Radeon HD 5770, a super drive, two 27" LED backlit display, a USB keyboard and mouse. That will add up to a lot of moola.
Sure, you could buy cheaper monitors, a pair of Core2Duos CPUs, cheaper ram, cheaper HDs, cheaper CD-ROM drive but then you would be comparing Apples to a piece of crap.
I have to ask you, why did not include a second ATI card when one could drive both displays and why would you need Apple Cinema displays for a "Workstation"? You artificially inflated the price. You could use a cheaper brand of monitor and only one ATI card.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
To play advocate of the devil here, since I care less about either Apple nor Java, isn't the side effect that Apple's competition in the phones world got a boot from the platform that is owned by the owners of iPhone?
I do not know what the implications are on the longer term but on the short term it causes their competition to spend time setting up new development environments, and diminished looking over the shoulders into the Apple technical world as developers are not going to keep up with that if they can't work from that platform anyway.
Maybe it would help if you rewrote that in English.
You're probably 100% correct, that does read as if it was written by someone for whom English is not a first language (or even a second language; it looks very much like a babelfish translation).
I think what the GP is saying is that this could be an anti-competitive move by Apple, in an attempt to both get a 'competing platform' (Java) off of the iPhone, and keep rival developers from easily working out Apple's technical details.
I'm not entirely sure that I'm accurate in thinking that, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to my personal feeling that Apple is shooting themselves in the foot by removing cross-platform compatibility. I could very easily see this as an attempt to remove a competitor, but I keep thinking there must be a deeper motive... I'm absolutely certain that anything we can crowd-source here must have been the subject of a heated debate in a boardroom somewhere in the bowels of Apple HQ, so there must have been a darn good reason to push this through.
Then again, maybe Mr. Jobs is psychotic, and has just arbitrarily decided there are too many developers for Apple's platform; this would translate directly to "we have too many users". Not necessarily a completely crazy viewpoint, as we have all seen companies that folded because they couldn't keep up with demand, and Apple has enjoyed explosive growth for the past few years.
What keeps nagging at the back of my mind is that no other third-party platform has Sun developing a Java Virtual Machine for it; every other JVM implementation has been licensed and developed by a third party. This could just as easily turn out to be an attempt by Apple to strong-arm Oracle into doing the grunt work for them.
Regardless of the reasons behind the decision, telling a large number of developers that you don't want them on your platform is probably the fastest method of removing large portions of your userbase, as when you remove support for a language, you remove access to all of the applications written in it. This may even cause some legal troubles, as many developers who have paid licensing fees to write apps for iOS just had their products "deprecated", too.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
I think you've nailed it (both overly dramatic and mostly about costs/benefits.)
The 'outrage' in the media surprises me. Maybe I'm confused, but I don't believe that Microsoft includes java on any of their platforms. Why isn't the media wound up about that?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
When you boil it down, for most people it's just jealousy. I hate to sound like a smug asshole, but I'm at a loss for what else it is.
When Microsoft does something like a typical douche or even something geeks just don't like you get a very simple "M$ sucks" thread. When Apple does something geeks don't like... the reaction is very different. There's this weird mixture of entitlement, hurt and, "But Apple, I weewy, weewy wuv Macs! How can you do this to me!?" (Oh, and there's the crowd that's always hated Apple and Macs, but every platform has haters.)
Apple makes cool shit and geeks want it but often their business model is anti-geek. (Which, makes sense since targeting geeks is never going to pad your bank account with $50,000,000,000.00 in cash reserves.)
Until there comes a day that I have no other choices in platforms, I'm not gonna freak out about what Apple does. Frankly, I don't much care what MS does anymore because there are viable choices. My only real remaining hatred for MS is Internet Explorer, a product that sucks on virtually every level and has held back web development for at least 7 years.
If they want to crush cross-platform development, then why aren't they moving to crush C or C++? Since C++ apps will run on just about every desktop and mobile platform out there (besides Blackberry).
It'll be nice if it plays out like he hopes... then again, we're talking Steve Jobs vs. Larry Ellison here, so anything could happen. The only thing that won't happen is either side admitting defeat and sucking it up to smooth things out for users of a free product.
Let's lowball the estimate, and say that the engineer's cost to the organization (desk space, salary, benefits, hardware, networking costs, phone, electricity, everything else - TCO, in other words) is in the order of ~150k per year. You and I both know that's low (HR estimates at my company place the value of 1 engineer for a year at about 250k), but let's assume it's much lower.
Figure you get about 2000 hours per year of work out of that engineer (40 hrs / week, 50 weeks a year) - that means the company is paying $75 per hour the developer works.
Now let's say that that setup is $3000 more expensive than an equivalent PC - the equivalent of 40 extra hours worth of work (75/hr * 40 hrs = $3000).
So how do we determine the point at which the company would break even on this investment? Most hardware is depreciated over 3 years. So... they'd have to get the equivalent of 40 hours extra of work out of the developer over 3 years, or 13.33... hours per year of extra productivity out of the more expensive system, to break even - roughly speaking, a ~0.7% efficiency gain, assuming 2000 hours worked each year - in other words, do 2013.33... hours of work in the time it would have taken previously to do 2000 hours of work.
Do you think that a developer being given a Unix desktop environment that he prefers, and the Unix environment which he's familiar with, would be able to squeeze ~4 minutes worth of extra productivity out of each work day? Shit, I spend that long just booting my system up & signing in while all the virus scans and security settings apply in the morning. I regularly spend that much time waiting for files to transfer around to a UNIX system so I can work on the files on the remote system, because my laptop runs windows.
Obviously, there's other costs to the organization as well, for supporting these additional desktops... but let's be honest here - you can easily make a strong case that spending a little bit more money on a better quality tool is an *investment* in increased productivity & increased savings over the life of the tool. You can't look at sticker price in a vacuum, and say "Mac > Windows PC, therefore robbery."
I pretty much thought that Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were/are on good terms/friends. It could be that Steve called up Larry and said, "Do you mind picking up Java development for Mac now that you own Sun?" and Larry probably said, "Sure."
Of course it also meant that no one else really knew or cared about it until Apple announced the decision to drop their Java development. Probably 2 or 3 engineers from Apple will be slaved to to Oracle and that will be it.
You're stretching. Two 27" monitors and two graphics cards? And he didn't say the company wouldn't spend $6k for "your" machine, just that some of their developers use Macs. For all you know the non-Mac developers are using ridiculously expensive Sun workstations or something.
Besides, the extra $3k might be worth it if it makes the developers more productive. A developer making $70k a year can cost a company around $95k a year with benefits. If the Mac makes them 3% more productive, it's worth it. If the alternative is a Windows PC, a 3% productivity boost seems feasible.
If they're too stupid to use the Mac tools for central admin, they're probably too stupid to use the Windows and Linux tools for doing it.
If they're not using X11 under Windows, why would they under Mac OS X?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Same thing on the server end - I don't need java to pretend that I'm running java to respond to a request from a java app/applet.
Java is on the way out. It was a good idea, poorly implemented, and never found a real calling. First, it was for set-top boxes; when that didn't work, it was re-purposed for web apps, then a general "write once, bring any machine to a crawl", then ... well, you get the idea. Between OraKILL and Apple, Java hasn't got a chance.
-- Barbie
Basically, Sun never supported Java on the Mac, Apple did. Apple provided the developers, the tools, apple did all the work, and then paid Sun for the privilege. (it costs money to make sure your JVM was approved).
With oracle now suing every other Java implementation out there that wasn't approved Apple probably thought it just wasn't worth it. Expensive to do, costs money to do it, and unless your sending money up to oracle yearly, now a patent nightmare mess.
Look at it this way a side effect might be that Oracle stops suing non oracle approved JVM's, including Davik. The Bad press might be more than they realize.
I was thinking the same thing. Oracle is becoming too lawyer-trigger happy with Java, and even if I was "safe" under some agreement I still would back out before they found a loophole to try to sue me over too. Besides, there is heavy chance their licensing agreement has ties to OS versions, and the upcoming Lion OSX forced revisions with terms Apple did not agree with.
Java isn't being "deprecated" on OS X. Apple is just not going to work on its native JVM implementation anymore. This isn't surprising since the Java-Cocoa bridge was deprecated years ago. Third-party JVMs, such as SoyLatte, will continue to work as usual.
Think of it - Germany, with 1/16 the population of China, and with a much shorter work day and work week, and 6 weeks minimum vacation, exports as much as China.
The 40-hour work week in the US has to go. It is a job destroyer. Productivity gains over the last 30 years should have been shared with the workers who actually do the producing - they have not been, to the destruction of the middle class.
What would the unemployment rate be if the US were to adopt a 4-day, 35-hour work week? Half what it is now?
Throw in the energy savings by people only commuting 4 days instead of 5, and people being more productive because they can get personal stuff done on the floating/rotating "extra" day off, and the economy would see an immediate boost.
Fewer people would be losing their homes. Or having to choose between eating and meds.
Sure, your take-home pay would be a few dollars less, but you'd also pay less in taxes, spend less on transit, lose less to taking time off for "personal reasons", and deficits to cover things like unemployment would be lower, so you would probably end up with more money in your pocket at the end of the month.
It works for the Germans, and the French.
-- Barbie
The side-effects are that Java developers won't use Macs. (Since I use neither Java nor Apple products, I don't really care that mcuh, but I think Apple might be shooting itself in the foot.)
Of much more concern is the App store for Mac OS X idea. Apple is turning Mac OS X into a closed iPhone-like system. I guess my anti-Apple rant will soon apply to Mac OS X as well as the iP* systems.
Prediction: Even if, ten years from now, the Mac platform is still just as open and general purpose as it was prior to the invention of the Mac App Store concept, people like you will continue to make factually baseless comments like this and continue to be modded "Insightful" on a daily basis during the entire intervening ten years.
If Apple is actually stupid enough to try and lock down a general purpose computing platform that is competing with other general purpose computing platforms, I will be happy to eat my words. In the meantime, every idiot who thinks the entire Mac platform is going to suddenly turn into some sort of locked-down extension of the iPhone next summer is _severely_ deluded. The Mac App Store is just going to be a bonus to the platform, not a restriction, and will make a ton of developers very, very rich in the next few years.
Oh, and totally on topic, Oracle will put out their own JVM for Mac and by a year from now nobody will even be questioning Apple's decision to stop making their own JVM which Java developers were always complaining about anyway because it was constantly one version behind.
Maybe it's just me, but lately the Slashdot community really seems to be in the practice of making mountains out of molehills, even more so than usual. Perspective seems to be all but lost around here anymore.
I disagree. What I observe is that Apple is rapidly moving away from cross-platform development by limiting the choice of languages.
On XCode 3.2, Apple removed all Carbon project templates. Why would they do that unless they plan on discontinuing Carbon on the future? The same XCode release removed the Cocoa projects that used Python and Ruby. And now Java is no longer supported directly by them. So if you want to use Cocoa, your only safe bet is Objective-C. Give it 5-10 more years, and you will have a very tightly controlled development environment that is not compatible with anything else. This may be convenient for Apple, but it is certainly not good for software developers.
I know that there are Objective-C compilers for other platforms, but I do not know a single cross-platform developer that prefers Objective-C over C++, when having available an equally well supported OS framework for both.
I'd mod you up if I had the points. A tool's a tool, and if your employees work best with one brand over another and it's such a small cost, you're wasting your time.
This all goes back to the post a while ago about specing out 1000 PCs for a governmental department, and some people earnestly thought it would be worth it to build your own. Insane! Find out what you really need and buy the right tool for the job and be willing to pay for it to work well. If you buy shoddy tools, expect them to hurt your bottom line in more ways than one.