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Apple deprecates Java

developer.apple.com

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Re: Apple deprecates Java

#221
post #96
post #95

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True, but would you rather not have it at all?

Definitely. Unusable software is as bad as none at all. Unless someone is paying well, I'm not going to deal with the issues.

Well, if you have a choice, sure. But if you're working in a team where everyone uses Eclipse, it's really nice to have the ability to run Eclipse.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#222

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It used to be cross platform. Back in the dotcom days, I was at a company that would sell implementations of it for Windows and Sun servers. That was when the software price started at 50k (iirc) though. When you're charging that kind of coin, I guess the motivation to support Windows is higher.

That might have been when WebObjects was still using Objective-C.

Our coders wrote their code in Java.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#223

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GCC has always been a centerpiece in the plan for the "viralization" of the GPL, and support for its role in this plan has always driven design decisions in GCC. This policy has caused a lot of headaches even just within the free software community (eg. http://lwn.net/Articles/343608/ ). I can't find a citation for this at the moment, but RMS has said on several occasions that GCC has to be difficult to integrate int…

...RMS has said on several occasions that GCC has to be difficult to integrate into other tools just for the sake of pushing the GPL. For example, this was his explanation for why improvements to GCC's intermediate representation formats (GIMPLE and friends) were refused for a long time. Weird. Though not as bad as the worst of Microsoft's shenanigans, this strikes me as in the same class of uncivil moves that the FS…

It makes some sense if you view it from the perspective of users rather than developers. The FSF comes from the perspective of being interested in what rights/freedoms end users have to modify software they receive, which takes precedence over other concerns. So basically anything that would make it easier for developers to ship stuff that end users aren't allowed to hack is bad.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#224
post #172

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They should care because they sell hardware to people who use those platforms. They will sell less hardware to Java/Scala/Groovy/Clojure/Jython/JRuby/Beanshell programmers this way. The Mac platform is not important enough for Oracle to care. And Java Apps won't be in the App Store.

Apple don't really have much of an interest programmers, other than those who are developing for their platforms (OSX/iOS). I doubt programmers make up a huge % of Mac sales either to be honest, with the success of the iPhone breaking Apple into the mainstream, I don't think it's that difficult to find casual users making the switch to a Mac

"I doubt programmers make up a huge % of Mac sales either to be honest"

You sure? It'd be interesting to see the results of an HN poll on this.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#225
post #185

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I think stuff like this isn't really that bad for devs who use the platform. Devs (should) have the ability to pull down the replacement in this situation when the time comes. It's going to be harder on the end user that no longer gets why his/her Java application no longer works right.

What end-user Java applications are there for OS X? The only one which comes to mind is Crashplan but I'm sure it's lurking around in other places.

[deleted]

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#226
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think stuff like this isn't really that bad for devs who use the platform. Devs (should) have the ability to pull down the replacement in this situation when the time comes. It's going to be harder on the end user that no longer gets why his/her Java application no longer works right.

What end-user Java applications are there for OS X? The only one which comes to mind is Crashplan but I'm sure it's lurking around in other places.

Do IDEs count? A lot of Mac users use Eclipse. It's not common among all-Mac teams that just do XCode, but it's fairly common for devs in groups that mostly do PC development to own Macbooks that they run Eclipse on.

Probably not a big concern for Apple, but it's common in universities, too, since Eclipse is (until now, at least) cross-platform enough that you can assume Windows/Mac/Linux-using students can all install it on their laptops.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#227

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SoyLatte is nothing more than a build of the OpenJDK BSD Port. You can build that yourself.

Not entirely the case. Soylatte is what became the OpenJDK BSD Mac Port. It was granted re-licensing and was merged upstream to OpenJDK. What this means: - The Java 6 Java Research License (JRL) binaries are based on Sun's Java 6 JRL releases, which mean they closely mirror the shipping official Java 6. They are also out-of-date and no longer supported. You can only build them using the JRL sources available from Soy…

Well, I should have said "at this point". Surely building bsd-port is more interesting than building your own Java 6.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...RMS has said on several occasions that GCC has to be difficult to integrate into other tools just for the sake of pushing the GPL. For example, this was his explanation for why improvements to GCC's intermediate representation formats (GIMPLE and friends) were refused for a long time. Weird. Though not as bad as the worst of Microsoft's shenanigans, this strikes me as in the same class of uncivil moves that the FS…

> this strikes me as in the same class of uncivil moves that the FSF complains about proprietary software vendors pulling Why? Did you buy a copy of GCC?

Making your software hard to interface with is making it less open. It's the same sort of move as making your word processor use an incompletely documented binary format.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#229

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Be it as it may, but xterm/X11 still kills Terminal.app in text rendering speed. Also, MacVim is, on my Mac at least, visibly slower in text rendering than the naked vim under xterm.

Text rendering speed? I type a letter Terminal, it appears. What are you doing that text rendering speed matters?

Builds. sbcl in particular is insanely verbose and is often limited by slow terminals. The readme for bootstrapping it even specifically suggests using xterm over gnome-teriminal/konsole.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...RMS has said on several occasions that GCC has to be difficult to integrate into other tools just for the sake of pushing the GPL. For example, this was his explanation for why improvements to GCC's intermediate representation formats (GIMPLE and friends) were refused for a long time. Weird. Though not as bad as the worst of Microsoft's shenanigans, this strikes me as in the same class of uncivil moves that the FS…

It makes some sense if you view it from the perspective of users rather than developers. The FSF comes from the perspective of being interested in what rights/freedoms end users have to modify software they receive, which takes precedence over other concerns. So basically anything that would make it easier for developers to ship stuff that end users aren't allowed to hack is bad.

So basically anything that would make it easier for developers to ship stuff that end users aren't allowed to hack is bad.

But if end users are hacking stuff, then they are also developers. Replace "end users" with "developers" and it gets interesting:

"So basically anything that would make it easier for developers to ship stuff that developers aren't allowed to hack is bad."

So making it hard to hack X for people trying to make Y hard to hack is okay. Seems a bit weird.

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