John D. Mitchell's Blog

JaveOne 2007, Where's Apple?

As noted by various people, including Malcolm Davis, there's a lot of Apple laptops in evidence at the show this year. In particular, a whole slew of them on-stage for the keynote sessions.

But where's Apple? Really?

For all of Apple's pledges that Java is a first class citizen, Java support on OS X has been tardy, at best. Each new, major release of Java takes many months (as in over a year) to show up on Apple machines. That's just plain retarded.

Of course, it always takes two to tango so I have to also ask "what is Sun doing to help or hinder Java on OS X?"

Comments

• 
  You're absolutely right! At the Java Posse BOF, they had a show of hands and fully 80% of the people there have and use Apple laptops. I use Parallels and have XP, Fedora 5, Fedora 7 and Ubuntu on my machine. I use it for development, documentation, personal productivity. It's the most flexible computer and OS out there.

  
  So c'mon Apple and Sun. Get together and continue Mac OS X as the premier Java development platform!!!
  

  Posted by: mcdewey on May 09, 2007 at 11:01 AM

• Well,if so many people use Macs and Java, does it really matter that the bleeding edge of Java doesn't exist on OS X?

  In the real world, Java 6 is not that popular, so Apple would seem to be keeping up with the mainstream.

  On a personal note, I'd like too see parity with Windows, but that's just not going to happen any time soon.

  Posted by: goron on May 09, 2007 at 12:44 PM

• If Sun wants people to use recent Java versions, they need to release simultaneously for Windows, Mac, and Linux (and Solaris, I guess). Mozilla does that with Firefox, and it looks like Adobe's plan in the future, too. Anything less from Sun is less than adequate. It's not Apple's responsibility to support Sun's platform (depending on whatever contracts may exist, I guess).

  Posted by: tompalmer on May 09, 2007 at 01:09 PM

• "It's not Apple's responsibility to support Sun's platform (depending on whatever contracts may exist, I guess)."

  Apple is an endorser of the technology, so it should be its responsibility indeed. As a side note, I think we all appreciate open technologies since they are open (!) so there's not a single implementor...

  Given that, I'd be the first happy person should Sun decide one day to directly support Mac OS X...

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on May 09, 2007 at 03:24 PM

• Of course, it always takes two to tango so I have to also ask "what is Sun doing to help or hinder Java on OS X?"

  Or as Homer once said: It takes two to lie: one to lie, one to listen!

  Posted by: felipeal on May 09, 2007 at 10:34 PM

• Of course, it always takes two to tango so I have to also ask "what is Sun doing to help or hinder Java on OS X?"

  Or as Homer once said: It takes two to lie: one to lie, one to listen!

  Posted by: felipeal on May 09, 2007 at 10:36 PM

• So, if one tells a lie and nobody is listening...?

  :-)
  

  Posted by: johnm on May 10, 2007 at 07:56 AM

• Well, as Apple's CEO quite publicly stated that Java is dead and of no consequence at the introduction of his iPhone I don't think Apple's going to be very interested in Java conferences for the time being (and probably not very much loved by Sun either).

  Posted by: jwenting on May 10, 2007 at 10:02 PM

• Well, there's the question of whether or not Java is going anywhere in the mobile market vs. where it is in terms of desktop and servers.
  

  Posted by: johnm on May 11, 2007 at 08:56 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.