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Apple deprecates Java

developer.apple.com

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Re: Apple deprecates Java

#71

Post by buster »

krelian wrote: post #14
martey wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not done Java development on OS X, but doesn't this mean that OS X 10.7 would not ship with a Java runtime? Wouldn't this have a negative effect on the ease of packaging and distributing Java programs on the platform?

Was Java that big on the Mac? Neither Windows nor most Linux distros ship with a Java runtime.

Still it is installed on pretty much every machine i know, be it server, desktop, windows or linux. Like Flash it is most of the time one of the first 3rd party tool to be installed, i guess..

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#72

Post by rbanffy »

Corrado wrote: post #37
krelian wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Java that big on the Mac? Neither Windows nor most Linux distros ship with a Java runtime.

Yes, at one point Apple made a big deal about Java being a "primary" language on the OS X platform. It had proper Coca bindings, Mac like look & feel, etc. Steve hawked it in one of the early OS X keynotes as being the future of the Mac platform. An easy language for all those that were confused by Objective-C. Several years ago Apple reversed their position on Java and have been ignoring it ever since. This is merel…

> Steve hawked it in one of the early OS X keynotes as being the future of the Mac platform

That's standard practice. You make it easy to port apps to your platform until you gain traction and until your exclusive technologies do, then make it hard to port away from your platform by phasing out technologies that would enable that.

A Java app that runs fine on OSX but that's easy to port to (or directly run on) Windows or Linux does Apple no good while an application written in Objective-C depending on the latest *Kit stuff locks both developer and user into Apple's walled garden.

Their move from GCC to clang is no coincidence.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#73

Post by sigzero »

chc wrote: post #45
shimonamit wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might I say, "the up and coming MacRuby platform Apple has designs for"? At least a couple of the committers are Apple employees. But I misattributed the project as being "theirs", which apparently isn't true.

Eh, it's Apple's in any meaningful way. The project is led by Apple's Laurent Sansonetti, hosted by Apple's Mac OS Forge, and Sansonetti has said that MacRuby is intended to replace RubyCocoa, which is currently bundled with Mac OS X. MacRuby also recently started making improvements to Apple's BridgeSupport framework. I don't know how much more an open-source project like MacRuby could do to deserve to be called "Ap…

From the contact page:

MacRuby is a free software project by Apple Inc. Many folks inside and outside of Apple contribute to this great project and we have a MacRuby Project Team page to list them. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, ideas or bugs to report.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#74

Post by meelash »

thought_alarm wrote: post #42
msy wrote: post #28

I wonder if putting the boot into the most straightforward cross-platform solution for desktop apps has anything to do with the proliferation of OSX Java apps with shoddy/un-maclike UX/UI or whether it's something to do with Oracle's recent moves.

I think it just means that Apple has no interest in bringing Java 7 to OS X. It certainly took them a long time to release Java 6. Funny thing is, one of my favorite Mac apps was/is written in Java: Cyberduck FTP client. Cyberduck is an open source app originally written using the Java/Cocoa bridge, then using some hybrid of Cocoa and Java. But the thing is, the end user has absolutely no idea that it's a Java applic…

Really, that's very surprising. I'm a longtime Cyberduck user and had no idea...

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#75

Post by masklinn »

rmc wrote: post #66
lyso wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However it isn't just the Cocoa bindings that are important. AFAIK SoyLatte's Swing/AWT elements run through X11. Apple's Java allows for Java GUIs without starting X11.

X11 is horrible on OSX. Applications that use it (e.g. The GIMP on OSX), are terrible and have many usability flaws, such as no clipboard between an X11 application and a normal application.

Yeah, OSX's X11 is utterly dreadful.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#76

Post by masklinn »

buster wrote: post #69
masklinn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Real question: is there an alternate, well-tested Java runtime that someone would advise to use afterwards ? Please carefully note the wording: > This means that the Apple-produced runtime will not be maintained at the same level, and may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X. The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained throu…

I think "may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X" sounds pretty much like it is very likely that it will be removed.

I don't think so. It makes it sound like if that's ever a bother, they'll drop it. But right now, they probably have the deployment architecture so no reason to ever remove it.

On the other hand, don't hold your breath for an OpenJDK release from Apple. In fact, that's very likely the purpose of the move: they're warning developers they will not port Java 7.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#78

Post by masklinn »

rbanffy wrote: post #72
Corrado wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, at one point Apple made a big deal about Java being a "primary" language on the OS X platform. It had proper Coca bindings, Mac like look & feel, etc. Steve hawked it in one of the early OS X keynotes as being the future of the Mac platform. An easy language for all those that were confused by Objective-C. Several years ago Apple reversed their position on Java and have been ignoring it ever since. This is merel…

> Steve hawked it in one of the early OS X keynotes as being the future of the Mac platform That's standard practice. You make it easy to port apps to your platform until you gain traction and until your exclusive technologies do, then make it hard to port away from your platform by phasing out technologies that would enable that. A Java app that runs fine on OSX but that's easy to port to (or directly run on) Window…

> Their move from GCC to clang is no coincidence.

Erm... what? Clang has already been ported to Windows (and other platforms). Their move from GCC to clang comes from GCC sucking goat's balls at error reporting and being integrated into an IDE. You might want to note Apple produces an IDE so that's kind-of a big deal for them, and a big reason for the existence of LLVM and related technologies (Clang, LLDB, ...) is very much that they can be used as libraries and easily integrated into tools.

Seriously, you should be careful, your anti-apple-tag shows a bit too heavily in that comment.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#79

Post by masklinn »

ramchip wrote: post #67
pmjordan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the close button on dockable floating windows. Is there an implementation of GTK that doesn't run via X11 on the mac? Gimp/Inkscape are lovely software on Linux, but using them on the Mac drives me insane. They're "meh" on Windows. I concluded a while back that the only decent way to do GUI programming properly was to develop multiple native frontends for the platforms you want to support. Everything els…

What about Qt? It looks good for me, although I never tried on a mac.

It's meh. Not as bad as GTK+ by a long shot but still a far cry from native applications. And OSX users generally don't like non-native applications (for a number of reasons)

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#80

Post by wheels »

blub wrote: post #52
albertcardona wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GTK is trying to get there. Gimp was ported to MacOSX GTK--haven't checked in a while the state of the port. The Inkscape dev team at least has high hopes that GTK will become stable for MacOSX. http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/

I disagree with GTK, and I recommend Qt. I use several GTK apps on Windows and they don't look native. Furthermore, GTK has some deeply ingrained usability issues - such as the close button - that they bring to all platforms.

I love Qt, and much prefer working with it to Cocoa, but Qt on OS X is ugly and doesn't feel particularly native. I can usually recognize a Qt app as soon as it starts up. It still gets the job done in the cases where elegance doesn't matter (i.e. we have a tool for optimizing query parameters that has a Qt GUI that we just use internally), but for places where it does, it's better to go with Cocoa.
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