{"id":53,"date":"2010-10-22T21:35:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-22T21:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/?p=53"},"modified":"2020-08-07T03:26:43","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T03:26:43","slug":"java","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/2010\/10\/22\/java\/","title":{"rendered":"Java on Mac OS X"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I spent a significant part of my career promoting and supporting Java development on Mac OS X, so I feel the need to eulogize in light of\u00a0Apple\u2019s announcement this week<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First: there are people at Apple who care about Java enough to work endlessly on it\u2014despite the company\u2019s perceived sentiments. They maintained multiple JDKs, on multiple CPU architectures and OSes, for years. They architected bridges and components that provided deep Java-native integration with (at the time) unprecedented ease of use. Executive quips always make headlines, but every Java team at Apple has been talented and truly dedicated, and they deserve recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there\u2019s the rub. Every hour of talent spent on Java is an hour not spent on the next Core Animation; the next Mission Control; the next iPhone. Apple is a consumer-focused company, and the Mac a consumer-focused product. They invested a lot early on in making Java on the desktop viable. It just hasn\u2019t happened. I\u2019m not particularly happy or sad about it, but desktop Java is over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about the iTunes back end? The online store? Don\u2019t they use Java? That might be a rhetorically amusing question, but it\u2019s a nonstarter. Whether Apple  has its own needs or not, supporting a few internal teams and supporting the world at large are two very different things. All that really matters is that it\u2019s going away for us on the outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More importantly, server technologies are a different story. The layer with the least traction in the market on any platform\u2014the client-side AWT\/Swing UI\u2014demanded the bulk of Apple\u2019s efforts. Since the Intel transition, building a server VM for Darwin is almost trivial. I have to think there will at least be a viable headless OpenJDK for the Mac by the time Snow Leopard reaches end-of-life status. If there isn\u2019t, then it\u2019s hard to argue with this move. If Java doesn\u2019t care about Java on the Mac, why should Apple?  It would be wonderful if Apple kickstarted a community effort by dumping its AWT source into OpenJDK, but now we\u2019re talking about lawyers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of Java professionals use Macs for development, even if they deploy somewhere else. What will they do? If they\u2019re using Eclipse, I think they\u2019ll be OK. It shouldn\u2019t take long to shim SWT on top of an OpenJDK port, and IBM has shown a lot of initiative over the years. Other \u201cpure Java\u201d IDEs, like JetBrains\u2019 (superior, in my opinion) IDEA, depend on a working AWT, and therefore have some more thinking to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Gruber notes<\/a>\u00a0that this could conveniently make it harder for Mac owners to develop for Android. I don\u2019t think that had anything to do with the decision. This was a long time coming. Java, like Flash, is a ball and chain for a company that loathes external dependency. And you just can\u2019t argue that client-side Java is important to the internet experience like you can with Flash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about the web, then? That\u2019s another abstract technology out of Apple\u2019s control, right?\u00a0Not entirely<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sad part is that there are a lot of passionate third-party developers who worked very hard over the years to deliver a first-class Mac experience with Java. They will have to rethink their priorities and either focus on other platforms, or think about a Cocoa port (which, on the Mac, includes not just Objective-C, but Python and Ruby as well). They can take some solace in the fact that they got more support than Carbon developers, who were arguably more committed to Apple platforms in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t think that Steve and Larry talked about this, either. Oracle probably cares the least of anyone. Java\u2019s future on Mac OS X is in the community\u2019s hands now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent a significant part of my career promoting and supporting Java development on Mac OS X, so I feel the need to eulogize in light of\u00a0Apple\u2019s announcement this week. First: there are people at Apple who care about Java enough to work endlessly on it\u2014despite the company\u2019s perceived sentiments. They maintained multiple JDKs, on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}