Not for me, for a while anyhow. It turns out that Lightroom has difficulties, and not only is Java 6 missing, apparently Java 5 is damaged. The two highest-value programs I run on this puppy are NetBeans and Lightroom, so this kind of hits me where I live. As it stands now, the Mac is generally speaking a superb server-side developers’ platform, because it’s Unix under the covers and because all the UI and housekeeping is decent and Just Works, not subtracting time from what matters. But you know, the largest single group of server-side software developers still lives in the Java world, and they won’t be going to Leopard until Leopard comes to them. Not, perhaps, a big demographic. But an influential one I think. [Update: I’ve seen several contributions, for example this from Adrian Sutton, saying that Java 5 on Leopard is just fine, thank you. That’s a relief.]
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: ramin (Oct 31 2007, at 00:48)
Not to mention all of the photographers who use Lightroom as a part of their workflow.
The more I use it, the more I like. And it even runs on Linux (well, almost ;)
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From: Thijs van der Vossen (Oct 31 2007, at 00:51)
I'm sorry, but I don't think that largest single group of server-side software developers still living in the Java world is that influential or important anymore.
Also, the whole 'Apple has basically spit in our face' thing is just silly. Java has never been an important part of Apple's business so it's no surprise the latest and greatest Java release is not immediately available.
If you don't like that, get a Sun Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation.
Oh wait, they're no longer available. I wonder why...
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From: M. David Peterson (Oct 31 2007, at 05:22)
Can't you just install Java 6 yourself? Of course MSFT doesn't ship a .NET product for the Mac (except for Silverlight, which is still in alpha release) so I can't use the "they don't ship .NET either" but the truth of the matter is that if MSFT did ship a .NET product for the Mac (beyond Silverlight) it would take all of about 5 minutes to download and install the SDK.
Also, isn't it really Sun's responsibility to make sure Java isn't broken on any given platform? Last time someone tried to change Java (MSFT) your company decided they had broken their terms of agreement, sued them, and won. Of course times have changed (thanks in part to you) and w/ OpenJDK people can at least hack on the source and make changes in ways they could not before. But is it really Apple's responsibility to spend their resources hacking on a Sun product?
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From: Curtis Hanson (Oct 31 2007, at 06:26)
I admit I'm naïve about the intricacies involved in implementing Java, but (paraphrasing John Gruber) if Perl, Python, and Ruby can be "built" to run on any UNIX-like OS, why can't Java? "It’s not Apple’s responsibility that Java isn’t like that — it’s Sun’s."
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From: Damian Cugley (Oct 31 2007, at 06:31)
My guess is that trying to devise ways to incorporate Leopard's new graphics layer in to Java turned out to be more complicated than expected. It must be an tricky process bridging Java to Cocoa when both Java and Cocoa are moving targets.
In general I get the impression (possibly unfounded) that Apple have found maintaining Java much harder than they bargained for. It's not as if they don't already have enough on their plates maintaining Cocoa and Carbon.
When it came to choosing priorities as the ship date approached, the indigenous development platform Cocoa took priority over Java. I expect a release of Java to emerge presently. Developers of alternative development systems should expect to have to wait a little before upgrading.
The problems complained about in old Java are in the 2d graphics stuff, so perhaps your IDE will still be functional enough to use should you nevertheless want to upgrade immediately. I assume it would not affect your server-side software at all.
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From: Rafe (Oct 31 2007, at 06:57)
The most recent version of Eclipse seems to work just fine on my iMac running Leopard.
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From: peter royal (Oct 31 2007, at 08:07)
java 5 on the leopard is fine. for some apps, you may need to flip back to the quartz renderer (they changed the default to be sun's 2d renderer), otherwise, works fine. people are just freaking out.
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From: Fred Clausen (Oct 31 2007, at 10:06)
@Thijs:
> I'm sorry, but I don't think that largest single group
> of server-side software developers still living in the
> Java world is that influential or important anymore.
While the RoR crowd has had many vocal advocates and a slew of startup successes, most of the business world is still being powered by and actively developed against Java. I think it is quite obvious that Java's hype cachet has tapered off, but that's to be expected from a platform that has pretty much stabilized.
People shouldn't rely on hype anyhow; good developers try to determine the right tool for the job. JP Morgan isn't going to switch to Ruby for their trade messaging backbone, and Twitter isn't going to move into a J2EE framework.
But you know which of those two companies hires more engineers.
> Also, the whole 'Apple has basically spit in our
> face' thing is just silly. Java has never been an
> important part of Apple's business so it's no
> surprise the latest and greatest Java release is not
> immediately available.
I think the big surprise is that as soon as Leopard was released, Apple pulled the Java 6 version from their developer site. They've been promoting Java 6 at the past 2 WWDC events (as recently as June), and telling people that it would be on Leopard. And I'm sure it will at some point; it's just obviously bugging people that Apple has been so silent about it.
I don't think the 'spit in our face' sentiment in the article Tim linked to is typical. Every dev I've talked with about it is pretty reasonable about the whole thing (the ones who absolutely need 1.6 features and are on Apple hardware have switched to Linux for the time being). This very post you have commented on is as reserved and reasonable as it gets.
You're lucky in that you can find free Ruby interpreters. Java developers on OSX have had to depend solely on Apple. The OpenJDK is still a ways off, although I imagine it wouldn't be terribly difficult for Sun to port the majority of their Linux JDK to OSX.
> If you don't like that, get a Sun Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation.
> Oh wait, they're no longer available. I wonder why...
Not sure where your snarkiness is going. Sun's money comes from big hardware. They, like Apple and every other company, took a chance on a particular product and then decided it wasn't good for business.
Apple has really lucked out in the number of high caliber and high visibility developers that have jumped on their wagon in the past few years, and I think people are rather surprised that they may have missed a great opportunity to push their newest systems as dev machines ne plus ultra.
Of course most developers have desktop machines in the office, and unless you're developing Apple applications the odds are pretty good that management has supplied you with a much more affordable, non-Apple machine (which cannot run Leopard anyways without hackage and EULA violation).
So it's by far mostly the devs who have either purchased personal machines or consultant types (eg. the RoR integrator du jour). I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that these are not coincidentally some of the most vocal people you'll see posting to the internet either on their own blog or someone else's.
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From: Stefan Tilkov (Oct 31 2007, at 15:36)
That initial source if yours is going to look pretty stupid once Apple ships Java 6, which I have no doubt is going to happen within the next few weeks.
People make such as a fuss about "Apple neglecting Java" when it's most likely just a timing issue. And there are obviously things that are vastly more important than Java 6 (who *needs* any feature in it, anyway? Is there *any* software that runs on Java 6 only, and not on Java 5?)
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From: Patrick Mueller (Nov 01 2007, at 09:18)
It's probably also worth noting that IF (big IF) Apple hosed Java 5 so badly with Leopard, that is in fact an indictment of the Java TCK (or whatever it's called - the compliance test suite for a JRE) - how could they call it Java if it was broken? They can't call it Java without passing the TCK, so if it's broken and passed the TCK ... the TCK isn't sufficient or is itself broken.
Or, could be those apps that are failing (big IF there) are not written correctly; depending on behaviour that they shouldn't be depending on.
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From: james hoskins (Nov 06 2007, at 03:02)
Personally, I've always preferred Gibbons over Leopards.
sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-javadb glassfish netbeans5.5
Or to put it another way, canonical can if cupertino can't.
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