PowerBook Performance for Java Development?

brasten wants to get to the core of this issue: "I'm in the market for a new development notebook. I would like to jump into the Apple world and pick up a PowerBook. However, compiling very large Java applications of course takes some time, and so raw processing speed is a factor. I have been unable to find solid data on how fast a 1.33GHz PowerBook runs against the modern x86-based notebooks. Does anybody have any information that could help me compare?"

Java and misc. development on Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Once you Mac, you'll never go back.

Neither my PowerBook G4 17", nor 12" offer break-neck speeds. My tests from mid last year concluded it can't out perform a generic PC laptop at the same price point. However it's a platform developed by smart developers for smart developers. Coming from either UN*X or Windoze, after a play, you're gonna oh-so-want one.

PS... You'll want all the RAM you can afford.

Depends on your dev env.

[cplim]

Although performance is important, it also depends on your development environment. For some of the work I do I need a database (PostgreSQL), and it makes it a hell of a lot easier to have the database, Java Application Server and IDE working on the one box so that if I need to work from home I can.

Although Windows does have postgres available via. Cygwin, I had some difficulty installing it on my windows box... so I got a Mac instead. :)

More than speed to consider

[NSObject]

We developed a fairly large (~80,000 lines of executable code) WebObjects application. Our dev machines are all 15" PowerBooks in the 800 to 1GHz range.

Compile performance is fine, but more importantly, it's always improving. It's 50% faster that it was a year ago on the same machine. Xcode's predictive compiling only works with GCC for now, but if there's a way to stick it on javac or jikes, Apple will do it.

Apple likes Java. They have a vested interest in it via WebObjects - which is the back end for iTunes and the whole Apple online store. 100% Java. They're also getting into JBoss and other Java related open source projects.

The development tools are really nice, and you *will* get hooked on the PowerBook. We've got two 2.8 GHz Windows boxen available. Nobody uses 'em... except SETI.

My Experience

[MarkX]

I did a similar transition two years ago. I went from a 1GHz PIII Dell Laptop running Red Hat something or other, probably 7.X, to a 450 MHz G4 PowerMac. The Power Mac was slower there is no question, but being able to have a Unix box with a native version of MS Office, and a complete Java environment was the clincher for me.

My development environment at the time:

• Terminal.app with Vim
• JBoss 2.4
• Ant
• Enhydra 3.1
• MySQL w/ InnoDB

I did extensive testing at the Apple store near me to make sure everything would work before making the move. They let me use a machine for two weekends solid. I would show up Saturday morning with my Dell laptop. I would take their top machine off the network and cross over cable it to the Dell, then copy all of my stuff over to the Power Mac. What I found after extensive testing is that the G4 running Java is basically MHz for MHz equivalent to a PIII.

Now, I was very happy switching to the Power Mac. Since then I have acquired a new Power Mac DP 1GHz, and an iBook 700, and both of them handle my environment very well. Of course the Power Mac is faster, but the iBook is acceptable. I would never go back to an Intel based laptop for Java development. Apple laptops are simply first rate, OS X stays out of the way, and the JVM is rock solid. I would guess that my next Apple laptop will be a PowerBook simply for the ability to pack it full of RAM.

So, get the PowerBook and come on in the waters fine,

Mark

Forget about the speed

[splattertrousers]

Nobody buys a Mac because it is faster or cheaper than a PC. Apple says that Macs are faster. Others dispute that. Others dispute the disputers.

It doesn't matter. You buy a Mac if you like Macs. I personally enjoy using Mac OS X far more than using Windows. Everyone I know who uses Macs love Macs. Nobody I know who uses PCs love PCs, they just tolerate them. But you need to decide for yourself.

Now, you asked about Java performance on the Mac. It's fine. I recently switched from doing Java development on a PC to a Mac, and the Mac was faster. It was a faster machine (a dual 1.25 GHz G4 vs a single 1.6 GHz Athlon), so what this proves is that the Java performance on the Mac isn't totally horrible (otherwise the faster machine would have been slower at Java).

One thing to consider is that Apple, not Sun, is in charge of making the JVM. Apple is always a bit behind. They just recently released 1.4.2, for example.

And I would disagree with the people who recommend XCode. It's a nice IDE, but if you're doing pure Java, then you're better off using a smart IDE like IDEA [intellij.com] or Eclipse [eclipse.org] that can do refactoring and smart code completion. IDEA and Eclipse both run fine on the Mac, though they look and feel a bit weird (IDEA has been getting much better recently; check out the version 4.0 release candidate [intellij.net] instead of the currently-shipping 3.0 release).

Finally, if you do decide to get the Mac, and you've never bought a Mac before, here are some tips: Apple (like all manufacturers) charges a lot for extras so you might want to consider buying extra RAM elsewhere, and fixing a Mac can be expensive so I would recommend Apple's extended warranty, especially on a laptop.

I am a Java dev that works with a tiBook 800

[Pengo]

I honestly was a bit scheptical myself before buying a laptop. I have been notorious at my company for buying a laptop and finding a way to give it to someone else and end up back on my workstation. About 2 years ago, when the tiBook had released the 800 mhz chip version (pre superdrive), I decided to make the jump.

First, the tools have come a long way. I was quite used to running eclipse on windows/cygwin or linux. Eclipse was very immature on mac when I bought my tiBook, but now isn't a problem.

The speed isn't the fastest in the world, probably on par with any lower end windows laptop you can buy today for 1100-1500 dollars still. BUT, I do strongly prefer to do java dev on my mac still. This is the first laptop that I have used as long as I have. It's working well enough, I am not sure I am going to even upgrade it this year.

iChat is pretty sweet, I use that as my primary communication tool with the rest of the engineers on my team. Unix terminal is great, I would get iTerm (Free), which is prefect for working on my remote app servers. Resin runs fine on my mac, so I can emulate my full development and deployment platform.

I also do a lot of scripts in Python as well, panther comes out of the box with everything just working. I haven't even bothered to install the debian tools apt for my mac yet.

JEdit is a great tool that runs perfect on my mac as well.

Now, I haven't reviewed the update that landed on my laptop yesterday, jdk 1.4.2. (automatic updates are nice).. but seems that everything is still working great after the update.

The ONLY complaint I have about my model is the poor reception on the wireless card.

My battery still seems to be holding strong.

I can't play any games on it, but thats probably not a bad thing as I would probably just get distracted.

I don't even bother with office for OSX anymore, as openoffice seems to suite my needs. Just find a Cocoa based launcher and your set.

I guess I would recomend that laptop if your wanting a nice tool for doing your work in. The tools are all there, if you use Java based tools. I am sure that the newer powerbooks would just 1-2x faster than what I am used to, but I am not complaining about speed at all. (My home workstation is a 3.06ghz comp with 2 gigs of ram, my laptop doesn't feel unreasonbly slow even after goofing with linux/windows on that machine).

My final advice is, determine if there is anything that you HAVE to do that won't work on mac, if the answer is no, it's definately a good buy and even though the laptops are a bit expensive, in my opionion, I have gotten every penny and more out of mine thus far and eventually when I feel my laptop is just not able to cut it anymore (no idea when this will be) will be replacing it with another apple high end laptop.

Good luck

Re:Overall its slower than x86

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on a crusade. I intend to post a comment like this one whenever I see anybody use "virii." Please don't interpret this comment as either endorsement of or disagreement with the parent post. Moderators: with your help, we can wipe out "virii" in our lifetime!

The plural of "virus" isn't "virii." There is no such word. The plural of "virus" is "viruses."

Here's a good explanation from cdknow.com [cknow.com], quoted here in its entirety because the people who most need to read this won't click on a link.

The correct English plural of virus is viruses. Please consult any good dictionary before making up words.

For the purists, in Latin, there is a rarely-used plural form:

virus, viri (neuter)

(Forms: almost always restricted to nominative and accusative singular; generally singular in Lucretius, ablative singular in Lucretius)

The point of this is that even in Latin the form "viri" is rarely used. The singular form is used in most every instance. (This is from the Oxford Latin Dictionary.)

So, when considering the Latin: "virii" is incorrect and "viri" was almost never used.

Despite the fact there was little use for the plural form, there is another reason why "viri" was rarely used. The most common Latin word for "man" is "vir" with "viri" being its plural in the form used as the subject of a sentence. Thus, since "men" as the subject of a sentence would be used far more often than "venoms" (virus means venom) the "viri" word was most commonly seen as the plural of "man."

Bottom line: Don't try to make up words using a false Latin plural form. Since the word virus in its English form is now used then the English plural (viruses) should be used.

More plural-of-virus resources:

perl.com [perl.com], the canonical and exhaustive source
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard's Frequently Given Answer [tesco.net]

I had asked a similar question awhile back

[rgraham]

I had a similar question [slashdot.org] posted to Ask Slashdot a couple of years ago. I went ahead with the purchase of a TiPB (now using an AlPB) and I can my experience has been great. Java and OSX go together very well and there is always a slew of people using PowerBooks/iBooks whenever I attend any Java related event.

One thing that I have noticed with Apple's JDK/JVM is that it does seem to take a little longer to fire up than Sun's JVM on Linux and Windows machines. I'm not quite sure why that is but in general it has been a non-issue.

Nice to see java guys using macs

[sbahn]

I'm a java programmer and I worked very hard to convince my boss to get me a 15" powerbook when it came time to order me a new machine. Funny thing is, it took me 8 months to justify mine, but then within one month three of my coworkers had theirs ordered. It's a great machine for development and it catches looks when working off site at the cafe too!

Jacob

Re: My Impressions..

[Anonymous Coward]

I run the same set up with IntelliJ IDEA. It's a nice set up for developing Java. Oh yeah, developing java code is my job, so I spend a lot of time on this machine.

Re: My Impressions..

[BitGeek]

Its important to remember whether you're talking about compiling on the run, or doing so while plugged in.

Any PC Laptop drops processors speed (And performance) dramatically when unplugged... but Apple laptops continue to operate at full speed when you're running off of battery.

So, if oyu really need a laptop to do compilations while travelling, then you definately want to go powerbook.

Also, the superiority of the Mac development environment cuts down on the need to compile as often (for objective-C at least, not sure about java-- you can make changes and incorporates them without recompiling and re-linking) so this is a big benefit.

Sounds like you've never had a powerbook before- either borrow or rent one and try it out if you can. But if not, I think you'll find that the mac may not be significantly faster than the PC for java compilations, but in most other ways they are much faster.

And I wouldn't be surprised to see them faster in java as well. When I Was last doing Java development I did it all on a 400MHz powerbook, and the rather large app compiled very quickly... never had to wait. You know, that nice pause while you think about what you're going to test-- and before it occurs to you to get up and get a soda or something, the compilation is already done.

Re: My Impressions..

[BitGeek]

I love how that is moderated "insightful" but the dissenting view is moderated "troll".

For a long time I thought Visual Studio was the best development environment-- the Mac side of things, including Codewarrior was not nearly as good.

Project builder did what it did well, but wasn't spectacular.

But XCode is really good. I have no incentive to try codewarrior (ok, I did try it again in late 2002) because XCode is totally excellent.

And its much better than the Visual Studio version I was using.

Integrated help, great compilation speed, ease of development and a short develop-compile-debuge-change-debug(without recompile) loop makes it a killer environemnt to work in.

I can see where Eclipse can be great, but the mac port isn't quite there yet.... so XCode, in my opinion, is the best development environment I've ever used, on any platform.

Re:Powerbook vs iBook

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

I have a four-year-old Dell CSX. It's absolutely fine. Some scratches on the case, but still fine. And trust me, it gets plenty of abuse. I have dropped it five feet onto concrete before (not in a case, but it was closed).

I also have a 3 year old Omnibook. It's fine too.

So don't tell me that they fall apart. They don't fall apart unless you abuse them. Get a good case.

Re:OS X is great for Java

[nsayer]

Having written a Java/Cocoa application (www.macxm.com) and run into a lot of serious obstacles, I am here to tell you that Java/Cocoa is not the way to go. At best, maybe if you have good MVC, you can take Java model classes and hook them to an Objective C controller/view layer, but there are just too many stupid problems otherwise.

Maybe it would be different if Apple actually wrote an important application in Java/Cocoa. The team doing it would walk down the hall and beat on the Java folks to fix some of these things. Then maybe I'd change my mind.

Sexiest Laptop Ever

[valmont]

i work for a large ISP in a team that builds a comprehensive portal that receives over 6 million unique page views in any 24 hour period. it's written in Java and runs in a Java Servlet Container (open-source)). Since Apple came out with the TiBook in 2001 and OS 10.1, my boss and i were the first ones to switch to powerbooks and OS X in the department.

Jump forward in late 2003, i now have a 1.25Ghz 15" powerbook with 1Gig of RAM and 80GB HD, and let me tell you, there is no end to what this thing can do. it will complete this mechanism that goes thru our whole JSP web application tree, converts each .jsp into .java then compiles into java byte code in about the same amount of time the fastest x86 laptops do. tho i dont have precise numbers. might be faster, might be slower.

while i understand your main focus is on raw power, i would urge you to consider productivity as a factor, based on your operating system's stability, security, and features. XP has greatly evolved in many aspects, and any good engineer can deal with just about any OS. With that said, OSX goes the extra mile to make your overall computing experience much more powerful, especially with Panther.

Expose, Fast User switching, XCode, Apple's own implementation of X11 (comes on the panther CD, it's *F A S T*, GIMP loads litteraly in under 5 seconds) so u can run any open-source app you want. Terminal.app for crying out loud. forget cygwin under windows, here you have a true UNIX bash shell. or tcsh. or ksh. it's all there. all the command-line utilities from the Unix and Linux world are all there. the cmd-line can also trigger things to happen in the finder/aqua-world: "open" could open a directory in a find window, or a file in which ever application created it.

let's talk about address book, calendar and mail. You may import all your Yahoo, Mozilla, Netscape contacts into AddressBook.app. Calendar.app lets you subscribe to calendars, accept .ics invitations, publish your own calendar, define multiple coexisting calendars. Safari's bookmarks interface will show u URLs defined in your AddressBook. Mail.app will read information from AddressBook to show email addresses as clickable "People Objects" and add new email addresses to your address book directly from an email you're reading. You can drag any picture from the web or iPhoto, or your desktop to an AddressBook entry, where it lets you zoom the pic in or out, crop, position, pictures associated with contacts show-up in Mail.app when u receive email from them. They also show-up in iChat.app. All those applications are very simple yet VERY powerful and are also well-defined open APIs any software developer can interact with. For example EarthLink lets you sync your Mac OS X AddressBook with their own online address book, which greatly facilitates email whitelisting to work with their highest-level CR-based spam-blocking feature (lower-level spam-blocking is Bayesian-ish filtering based on email content). Mail.app comes with its own adaptive Bayesian spam filtering that becomes smarter and smarter overtime as you "train it". Mine has become *extremely* effective at blocking spam, and i can tell you this is a definite productivity enhancer. Then there is iSync. A true marvel. iSync is also an open API to sync multiple devices over just about any port or conduit. Most PDA-ish devices and Phone manufacturers have made their devices compatible with iSync, and more are coming on the market every day. Your Calendars, Contacts, Bookmarks can all be sync'ed via iSync to any number of devices WITHOUT installing a single piece of software that may have shipped with such devices. this is HUGE. Currently i'm using iSync to sync an iPod (bookmarks, address book, calendar, over FireWire), a Sony Ericsson t610 (over bluetooth, built-in all the Aluminum powerbooks, including mine), my .MAC account (calendar, address book, bookmarks, over HTTP/webdav i think). I could buy a Palm Pilot and just sy

A Real Benchmark taken right now

[gregluck]

Build times for Java are a combination of source code generation, compiling, jar execution and ant scripts.

I have an app I just built on the following machines:

Apple Power Mac G4 867 with JDK.1.4.2 - 18 seconds
Toshiba 1.8Ghz PIV with JDK1.4.2 - 16 seconds

I find both machines fine for running IDEs like IntelliJ 4 and JBuilder X. Your 1.3 G4 should be fine for the next 2-3 years. Java is also actually getting faster as it goes, so even my older hardware feels great 2 years on.

So, I would say that speed should not be the differentiator.

One thing to consider is that new versions of Java are out for Intel - Linux and Windows before Mac. This is an effect of Apple doing their own JDK under licence from Sun. For example JDK1.5 beta is out on Intel, but will probably be 6 months away on Apple. Apple just released JDK1.4.2, once again about 7-8 months behind Sun. You get the same situation on HP-UX and Compaq Alpha.

On the other hand no other OS vendor is as committed to Java as Apple. It is a first class language for Mac development.

James Gosling, Martin Fowler and a lot of people from the company I work for, run their Java on Mac.

Finally, Java, with the Quartz look and feel looks just beautiful on Mac.