Fabrizio Giudici's Blog

Mac OS X 10.5 delayed to October: what about Java 6?

Apple has just posted bad news: the release of Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) has been delayed to October.

With the usual arrogance, Apple has never disclosed to Java developers its official plans about Java 6, but since the latest pre-release dates several months back we have understood that the final release is bound to Leopard. This was already a questionable decision, in any case until yesterday it looked like Leopard was really close so we could live with it.

Releasing Java 6 at October 2007 means TEN MONTHS of delay with respect to Sun release. We are back to the bad habits (Java 5 was released with a huge delay too).

I'm really upset since this means that I won't be able to use my MacBook Pro for developing with Java 6 for several months (yes, I do have Linux and Windows on multi-boot and in virtualization with Parallels, but this was supposed to be done for multi-platform testing only).

Now, since Apple was able to release Java 6 betas on Mac OS 10.4, this means that there are no technical dependencies on Leopard - just a marketing choice. Now, given that Apple has missed the June target for Leopard, one would hope that they now release Java 6 for Tiger - but I bet that we won't have even a public statement about Apple plans, as usual, and we are forced to guess.

Comments

• My thoughts exactly. Give us at least a new beta version that matches what shipped in the Sun release for Windows and Linux.

  Posted by: trisberg on April 12, 2007 at 05:52 PM

• I wonder, what is the difference between the last beta drop and the final release? Is there API coverage that is missing, or is it only bug fixes?

  Posted by: kirillcool on April 12, 2007 at 08:28 PM

• It is a shame, but I find disturbing the Sun arrogance that Apple should apply the same level of importance to Java that they themselves do. In the real world, most Java software runs on 1.3, 1.4 maybe 5.0.

  I'm not too bothered about the delay (in 10.5 nor Java 6). Most of the Java work I do is tied to Windows anyway.

  Posted by: goron on April 12, 2007 at 09:38 PM

• Why don't Apple use Harmony?

  Posted by: fmike on April 12, 2007 at 11:19 PM

• @kirill: Bug fixes. Many bug fixes. I use Java SE 6 on Mac OS X as my main VM and it works really fine. IntelliJ has a couple of issues with this particular version of the VM but it's not IDEA's fault I guess. Other than that, all the Java apps I run work really well (NetBeans and LightZone for instance.)

  Posted by: gfx on April 13, 2007 at 12:05 AM

• @kirill gfx said it all, I'd add three points: first according to release notes, there's no way to clean uninstall the beta and "it could require to reinstall the operating system". Probably this is just a precautionary warning and you could to with a bit of caution. But above all everything that Apple releases as beta is under an implicit NDA agreement, and you can't talk about it publicy. So if you get stuck with a bug you can't ask for help in a blog, mailing list, etc... Third: in absence of any official communication by Apple, you can't do any serious planning for real projects where you're bound to a delivery.

  @goron I don't understand the point with "Sun arrogance". I'm a freelance and I talk for myself. I find Apple's behaviour arrogant with respect to _developers_. I'm aware that most of the world runs 1.3,1.4,1.5, but, sorry, I could have real world customers willing to run 1.6...

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on April 13, 2007 at 12:33 AM

• You mention Parallels. I'd like to go that route as well, but I can' t get Ubuntu, for example, to install reliably on the Mac OS X version of Parallels. That was going to be my temporary solution for getting a current SE 6 on this MacBook Pro hardware. If you have tips for getting Linux installed, please share them!

  Posted by: joconner on April 13, 2007 at 12:53 AM

• This is a good chance to give a try to Ubuntu. I am a happy user of Ubuntu Feisty since January, and is close to go final (19th of April). You can install any kind of java you want and if you need some tip about Ubuntu on Macbook, just give me a call ;)

  Posted by: ildella on April 13, 2007 at 01:01 AM

• @joconner Indeed I wasn't able to install Ubuntu in Parallels too - it looks like the installer crashes or hangs when it does something about the partitions. In any case I do know people who managed in doing it (so I thought it was just my fault!). At the moment, having managed in freeing a lot of space on my hard disk, I've resorted with a multi-boot (I can multi-boot everything and run Windows in Parallels).

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on April 13, 2007 at 01:06 AM

• @ildella Oh ho, ciao! :-) I think that these bad news from Apple for sure are raising the quotations of Linux. Looking around I've found a lot of people, including long-time Mac users, starting to be really worried about the new priorities at Apple (according to the official statement they have privileged the launch of the f**ing iPhone), also given that they dropped the "computers" word from the corporate name. But this is another story...

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on April 13, 2007 at 01:08 AM

• @kirillcool: there are even API changes... the annotation processing environment which evolved from JSR 269 is different from the one released with Java 6

  Posted by: riejo on April 13, 2007 at 05:03 AM

• I am using ubuntu 6.10 over parallels adn works fine. Of course, there are much more features to windows than to ubuntu. But it works with no crashes.;)

  Posted by: cax on April 13, 2007 at 05:24 AM

• ok, if I decide to use Ubuntu, it it a good idea to spend 30 or 40% more money to buy a fashion computer I will never touch the OS ? In this case, I strongly soggest to buy a good machine for much less money and enjoy the same usability and robustness of Ubuntu without paying royalties for the arrogant Apple :)

  Posted by: felipegaucho on April 13, 2007 at 07:32 AM

• Well, the problem is that Ubuntu doesn't have the same usability of Mac OS X... Clearly, should Apple continue to do bad things with Java, one could prefer a less-usable operating system, but more Java friendly...

  PS I don't think the difference over competitors is 30/40% price; for sure the Mac Mini (if you don't need keyboard and monitor, for instance reusing the same stuff in a lab with a switch) is one of the best price / value products around, not even considering the size factor.

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on April 13, 2007 at 07:39 AM

• regarding ubuntu: [a] we're developers, we're not my grandma. [b] it's not an issue of usability; it's an issue of habit. [c] in many ways some of apple's products are more polished. you might run into issues with video codecs / viewing video. you might run into issue with getting audio+mic to work for things like skype. afaik, linux does not have a good solution for presentation software (sorry openoffice impress). otherwise, it's a pretty awesome product and works very well, and doesn't require you to be a rocket scientist to figure things out. some things are better than macs: keyboard accessiblity, the variety of available applications is staggering, free applications, software installation with apt-get is second to none, performance is great. you get java 6 when sun releases it. ruby installation is much easier than on a mac.

  Posted by: eitan on April 13, 2007 at 09:07 AM

• Regarding [a], just because I'm an architect / developer I appreciate when I am at a customer, I connect to his network, discover and configure the printer and produce a printed document in a matter of a minute, while the Linux consultants are still tweaking with the configuration and the Windows ones won't probably get a decent print in a day (if they ever get it). :-) I'm talking of real experience. I got paid for delivering, not for administering my laptop. :-)

  For me it's neither an issue of habit, since I'm a Mac user since two years, while I've been running Windows ad Linux for more than ten years. And I seriously evaluate a switch to Linux before choosing Mac OS X.

  For what concerns applications, I have everything I need but Microsoft Project, and I won't find it with Linux.

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on April 13, 2007 at 09:17 AM

• the Windows ones won't probably get a decent print in a day (if they ever get it). - right, because Windows is so bad at configuring the printers... Major fud from an otherwise respectable source.

  Posted by: kirillcool on April 13, 2007 at 09:48 AM

• Well, I had been working at the very same customer a few years before, before my switch to Mac OS X, and with Windows I hadn't ever been able to decently print a single page. Typical sequence: can browse the network but I don't see _that_ printer, then they give me the name, no way, then the IP address, then I can see it but it asks me for user/password, they give me the credentials but I can't login. Another slightly different variant is that I can login and print, but the print has severe marging problems. In the end I always gave up, made a PDF and asked a local co-worker to print it for me. I swear, after the first print in a minute with Mac OS X I was literally screaming.

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on April 13, 2007 at 10:09 AM

• PS That customer is a major italian corporate with a few different physical facilities and a very broad network. When I clicked "Add a printer" from Mac OS X, bonjour found literally tenths of printers, so many that my local co-workers not even suspected to exist... (before somebody asks for it: yes, that network was very liberal with multicasting).

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on April 13, 2007 at 10:11 AM

• Apple has certainly broken the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" appeal of Java. At least for client-side Java, it's not true that most places are using 1.3 or 1.4. For client-side Java, it's very very desirable to use the latest JRE especially for the bug fixes and performance improvements.
  

  Posted by: neilweber on April 13, 2007 at 11:09 AM

• I still preffer to pay a bit more to have an apple computer that runs everything I want. I can have 2,3 VMs running with no glicht on my mbp. Moreover, the hardware itself is far much better than anything I know. ibm, crap dell, acer and so on.

  Posted by: cax on April 13, 2007 at 09:57 PM

• Java 6 is mostly just relevant for desktop applications, where it fixes a lot of issues and contains significant performance improvements. Probably most Mac's are used as desktops, so it does make sense for Apple to stay current.

  What's interesting though, is the change of focus within Apple, that becomes appearant from the choice they make to delay Leopard in favor of the iPhone.

  Another thing I'm wondering, has Apple ever publically stated it will ship Java 6 with Leopard?

  Posted by: marrs on April 15, 2007 at 06:20 AM

• The Mac line is an "ipod accessory" ... you can see where they are focused, with a streamlined experienced on simplified consumer products (which will fail eventually, they will be at the mercy of content producers in a commodity market). The iPhone is not going to support Java, and it is the next generation iPod. They're not even pushing it as a handheld computer, aside from saying it runs OS X.

  The major Java desktop app is Azureus (a bittorrent client), that doesn't fit into Apple's plans at all, otherwise you just have developers. Would be interesting to know what % they are of Apple's sales.

  The best solution would be if Apple would support an open source implementation of Java, but how likely is that considering they want to support their "proprietary advantages?" Look how long the AWT-SWT bug has been around.

  
  

  Posted by: masonda on April 15, 2007 at 07:33 AM

• If you want to use you MacBook, you can install the developer release of Java 6. Works great.

  Posted by: bitpuddle on April 15, 2007 at 04:36 PM

• Just to back up what Fabrizio is saying about ease of use. I have found that for setting up a development environment for Java, the Mac is easily an order of magnitude faster than any of the Windows corporate environments.

  The reason for this is partly, as the saying goes, "a little from column A, a little from column B". Partly it is Windows, partly it is the corporate environment. Many large corporations are so terrified of Windows (read as: Outlook and Word Macro) viruses that they have locked down everything except Outlook and Office. (Normally I'd admire the recursiveness of that. It is like a massive car crash that produces a work of art)

  The _minimum_ time to set up a Windows PC (for Java development) in the last half dozen corporate enviropnments I've been in is 3 weeks (15 working days).

  My average time for setting up a Mac for Java development: 0.5 days.*

  As for printers, I don't know about that. Most of the Windows corporate environments I've been in it hasn't been a big deal, though in at least one environment you needed someone with network Admin access to do the install of the printer (local admin wasn't uber enough).
  
  * I think it would take longer with Eclipse, but Eclipse is crippled 'out of the box'**, you need to go and download a whole bunch of stuff which requires downloading other stuff just to tell you it can't do the build because you need to twiddle the config for a while longer :D.

  ** Netbeans is immensely much better out of the box, but the developers did something hideously evil, which ended up whacking on another 1.5 days to my total time spent installing/configuring the Mac box over the lifetime of that project. Bad Netbeans developers, no biscuit.

  Posted by: rickcarson on April 15, 2007 at 04:53 PM

• For the printer stuff, I just reported my experience. It might be I'm lazy, or I'm ham-handed with hardware ;-) and most of my co-workers are, but the point is that with the same level of lazyness things with the Mac OS X tend to work easier...

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on April 17, 2007 at 12:05 PM

• To install Ubuntu on MBP I did the following: Chose generic Linux 2.6, partitioned manually and left most of the HD empty. The rest I pretty much left as the default and didn't touch.
  Personally I find the Java 6 on Mac quite unstable, it just crashes allot. Bidi suffers terrible regressions too. While my current project runs fine on Java 5 I need Java 6 to compile it, Netbeans doesn't make it simple to use on VM for compiling and another one for running... This is not a common use case so I'm not complaining against Netbeans but it would be cool ;-)

  Posted by: vprise on April 17, 2007 at 10:16 PM

• >Netbeans doesn't make it simple to use on VM for compiling and another one for running...

  Just register alternative JDK in Tools->Java Platform Manager and set it as current in project properties. You can also set minimal version of JDK that the project requires to compile.

  Posted by: tomslot on April 18, 2007 at 04:45 AM

• Apple's complete inability to stay current with the Java platform is why I recently purchased a wintel laptop instead of a new mac book pro. Face it, Apple is a consumer electronics company and doesn't give a hoot about something as geeky as the JVM level in their OS. Their new clients (iPod users) aren't demanding it of them. Mac isn't the place to be for a professional Java developer.

  Posted by: timsporcic on April 18, 2007 at 06:26 AM

• @tomslot
  Please reread my comment, this would require compiling with 5 or constantly switching VM's which rescans the classpath. Not very easy to use. I would want a right click "run with platform" option that opens to show available platforms choices.
  The source level is already set to 1.5 which is why I said it works on Java 5, but I use Java 6 features in some conditional code.

  Posted by: vprise on April 18, 2007 at 08:53 AM

• You OS X Java developers need some incentive to upgrade to Leopard! :)

  Perhaps these delays might convince Apple to bow to Sun's lead and release their JVM under the GPL.

  Certainly open sourcing their implementation of hotspot for PPC would help Linux developers on that platform.

  Java would certainly be a comprehensive sample application demonstrating the merits of OS X APIs such as Cocoa. What competition do they face? Can they really be worried about anyone porting their JVM to GNUStep?

  Making the code available would assist 3rd party providers in solving OSX specific issues, viz the recent AWT/SWT integration issue.

  Posted by: pcox on April 19, 2007 at 07:07 PM

• I don't like the delay at all. I believe it is Apple's responsibility to
  keep reasonably up-to-date with anything it advertises as a developer
  tool available for OS X, or at least to inform developers
  as to a timetable when that doesn't happen. Apple does not live up to those
  responsibilities w.r.t Java, and their behavior in this case has become the rule
  rather than the exception. I also find it arrogant that they refuse to supply developers with any information regarding the timetable for new Java releases.

  This hurts Java's cross-platform nature. I hope that jdk 7 development will
  undertake more effort to make reasonable implementations available
  for Mac OS X in synch with releases for the other platforms. I think that,
  for example, an X11 based version for the ppc and intel architectures on OS X is not too ambitious for
  jdk 7 and would alleviate the problem of developing with recent java releases
  on OS X a great deal.

  Posted by: wscottcotton on April 20, 2007 at 07:45 AM

• It is truely a pity! I totally agree that the only reason for the delay is purely commercial. Slowing but surely thing are moving towards the open-sourcing scenario. But Apple would really do themselves a huge favour if they were to simply release the JDK independently of the major OS releases. A simple free update just like they do eg with iTunes. They are holding back a quite big (but potentially enormous) community of Java developers. The mac/powerbook has become the de-facto favourite mobile development Java platform (just take a count at any development conference!). But Apple's attitude has not budged - quite incomprehensibly IMO. I do hope they will in the near future.

  Posted by: maurotalevi on April 23, 2007 at 04:09 AM

• Mauro, of course I totally agree. Re: the comments about opensourcing the JDK in Mac OS X, or building an opensource alternative based on X11, I'm skeptical. For the former thing, because I don't see Apple with an attitude to open source anything that it's not the kernel of their system (but who knows, maybe I'm wrong); for the latter, because we'd get a Java runtime which is poor-integrated with Mac OS X, and Apple users are very keen of a smooth integration with the system.

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on April 23, 2007 at 08:17 AM

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