Gosling Reacts To Apple's Java Deprecation 436
Kurofuneparry writes "Apple has announced that Java is deprecated as of the most recent update to OS X. This shot across the bow is getting some responses. To Jobs' claim that 'Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms,' James Gosling is quoted as saying that 'simply isn't true.' Much talk of a coming turf war is to be had. This certainly can't be unrelated to statements from Jobs recently covered on this website and is sure to make waves. Apple has enjoyed significant success recently accompanied by a widespread sense that they can do no wrong in business or design. However, is deprecating Java a mistake? It doesn't take much insight to connect the dots and see that Apple has starting marking friends and enemies relative to the increasingly heated fight for mobile and other platforms."
Cost to support benefit (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cost to support benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, Sun never supported Java on the Mac, Apple did. Apple provided the developers, the tools, apple did all the work, and then paid Sun for the privilege. (it costs money to make sure your JVM was approved).
With oracle now suing every other Java implementation out there that wasn't approved Apple probably thought it just wasn't worth it. Expensive to do, costs money to do it, and unless your sending money up to oracle yearly, now a patent nightmare mess.
Look at it this way a side effect might be that Oracle stops suing non oracle approved JVM's, including Davik. The Bad press might be more than they realize.
Re:Cost to support benefit (Score:5, Interesting)
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Apple already lagged behind Java releases, especially large ones like going from Java 5 -> 6. If Oracle picks up the slack and develops an OSX JVM Java on the Mac could end up being in a better situation.
I do agree that if Java is left to whither on the Mac it's going to hurt Apple in some way, although it's still hard to quantify how much.
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Don't you anticipate that Oracle will start shipping java for OS X? I mean, really.
Re:Cost to support benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
The reasoning SJ gave for dropping it though was precicely that it wasn't keeping up – if apple maintain it, it's constantly one version behind as they get the new source and patch it into their JVM... If oracle do it, it stays nice and up to date all the time.
Re:Cost to support benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
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Really now, stop it with the FUD. Just one of those CPUs costs 568.58 - $683.66 CAD so you are looking at 1100-1300 for the CPUs alone then add the price of 8GB of ram, a 1TB SATA drive, Two Radeon HD 5770, a super drive, two 27" LED backlit display, a USB keyboard and mouse. That will add up to a lot of moola.
Sure, you could buy cheaper monitors, a pair of Core2Duos CPUs, cheaper ram, cheaper HDs, cheaper CD-ROM drive but then you would be comparing Apples to a piece of crap.
I have to ask you, why did not
Re:Cost to support benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's lowball the estimate, and say that the engineer's cost to the organization (desk space, salary, benefits, hardware, networking costs, phone, electricity, everything else - TCO, in other words) is in the order of ~150k per year. You and I both know that's low (HR estimates at my company place the value of 1 engineer for a year at about 250k), but let's assume it's much lower.
Figure you get about 2000 hours per year of work out of that engineer (40 hrs / week, 50 weeks a year) - that means the company is paying $75 per hour the developer works.
Now let's say that that setup is $3000 more expensive than an equivalent PC - the equivalent of 40 extra hours worth of work (75/hr * 40 hrs = $3000).
So how do we determine the point at which the company would break even on this investment? Most hardware is depreciated over 3 years. So... they'd have to get the equivalent of 40 hours extra of work out of the developer over 3 years, or 13.33... hours per year of extra productivity out of the more expensive system, to break even - roughly speaking, a ~0.7% efficiency gain, assuming 2000 hours worked each year - in other words, do 2013.33... hours of work in the time it would have taken previously to do 2000 hours of work.
Do you think that a developer being given a Unix desktop environment that he prefers, and the Unix environment which he's familiar with, would be able to squeeze ~4 minutes worth of extra productivity out of each work day? Shit, I spend that long just booting my system up & signing in while all the virus scans and security settings apply in the morning. I regularly spend that much time waiting for files to transfer around to a UNIX system so I can work on the files on the remote system, because my laptop runs windows.
Obviously, there's other costs to the organization as well, for supporting these additional desktops... but let's be honest here - you can easily make a strong case that spending a little bit more money on a better quality tool is an *investment* in increased productivity & increased savings over the life of the tool. You can't look at sticker price in a vacuum, and say "Mac > Windows PC, therefore robbery."
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I'd mod you up if I had the points. A tool's a tool, and if your employees work best with one brand over another and it's such a small cost, you're wasting your time.
This all goes back to the post a while ago about specing out 1000 PCs for a governmental department, and some people earnestly thought it would be worth it to build your own. Insane! Find out what you really need and buy the right tool for the job and be willing to pay for it to work well. If you buy shoddy tools, expect them to hurt your botto
Re:Cost to support benefit (Score:4, Informative)
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Apparently you can translate them though and they'll "run".
Re:Cost to support benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cost to support benefit (Score:4, Funny)
They didn't make their own JVM, it's HotSpot.
Re:Cost to support benefit (Score:5, Informative)
I know of one significant difference between the jvm: I made a scheme interpreter in java for a BSc project and when my interpreter ran on a mac I could evaluate 10000!, it would take a long time but I would finally have a result but on a pc or linux or even a SUN server it crashed around 4000! with a stack overflow. This difference was caused by the JVM, the one on from apple would optimized tail call recursive JITed methods into loop. The one from SUN would not....
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Save this post. It is the first legitimate use of over 9000!
anon
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You could evaluate it using the Windows or Linux VM, but you'd have to use -Xss.
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Do you know what Scheme is?
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Apple has maintained Java on Mac for the last 15 years. I don't know if that's because Sun didn't do it or because Apple did it anyways. Chicken and egg problem. Now Apple isn't removing Java, merely no longer providing new JVMs and updates. You can look at the move by Apple in two ways:
These two reasons are not mutual
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You mean like phonegap(http://www.phonegap.com/) or jqtouch(http://jqtouch.com/)? Both of which are approved for use in the applications in the App Store?
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If they want to crush cross-platform development, then why aren't they moving to crush C or C++? Since C++ apps will run on just about every desktop and mobile platform out there (besides Blackberry).
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On XCode 3.2, Apple removed all Carbon project templates. Why would they do that unless they plan on discontinuing Carbon on the future? The same XCode release removed the Cocoa projects that used Python and Ruby. And now Java is no longer supported directly by them. So if you want to use Cocoa, your only safe bet is Objective-C. Give it 5-10 more years, and you will have a
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Basically, Sun never supported Java on the Mac, Apple did. Apple provided the developers, the tools, apple did all the work, and then paid Sun for the privilege. (it costs money to make sure your JVM was approved).
With oracle now suing every other Java implementation out there that wasn't approved Apple probably thought it just wasn't worth it. Expensive to do, costs money to do it, and unless your sending money up to oracle yearly, now a patent nightmare mess.
Look at it this way a side effect might be that Oracle stops suing non oracle approved JVM's, including Davik. The Bad press might be more than they realize.
I was thinking the same thing. Oracle is becoming too lawyer-trigger happy with Java, and even if I was "safe" under some agreement I still would back out before they found a loophole to try to sue me over too. Besides, there is heavy chance their licensing agreement has ties to OS versions, and the upcoming Lion OSX forced revisions with terms Apple did not agree with.
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The 'outrage' in the media surprises me. Maybe I'm confused, but I don't believe that Microsoft includes java on any of their platforms. Why isn't the media wound up about that?
Inaccurate headline and summary (Score:3, Informative)
Java isn't being "deprecated" on OS X. Apple is just not going to work on its native JVM implementation anymore. This isn't surprising since the Java-Cocoa bridge was deprecated years ago. Third-party JVMs, such as SoyLatte, will continue to work as usual.
If you mention Goslings reaction (Score:5, Informative)
at least link to the corresponding blog:
http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/steve_jobs_comments_on_apple [nighthacks.com]
Reading tea leaves (Score:2)
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"Java's days may be numbered anyway"
You state that like it's a bad thing...
No definite transition plan (Score:5, Interesting)
Where I work we use a lot of Apple Java and now we have absolutely 0 idea on whether we should invest any more in Apple at all. Buying new hardware and transitioning to a new platform is expensive, but at least the other major platforms(Windows and Linux) do at least provide some certainty as to the future of those products and the platforms they will support.
Basically Steve is treating major software platform updates the same we he treats iMac hardware updates, and that just doesn't sit well with a lot of people.
Re:No definite transition plan (Score:4, Insightful)
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without ANY concrete plans on a way forward.
Apple does have a fairly long history of keeping their plans secret as long as possible, so they may actually have one. They still don't seem to be targeting the "enterprise", so may be continuing that way here.
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Many will say that Oracle can supply the JVM. That is not acceptable. This will lead to cases where the JVM is broken by an Apple update to the OS. This is not like Flash where if it breaks, who cars. There is nothing critical about flash.
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Oh honestly (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems to have become trendy again to hate Apple no matter what, but this is getting ridiculous. Why is it that Apple is expected to be the only platform vendor that has to maintain their own version of the JVM for free? Jobs is quite correct in saying that Java under OS X has long lagged behind the latest official Sun release. I wish it was more common for Apple to leave more components to third parties now that they've got more market share. Another example would be graphics drivers, which lag tremendou
Re:Oh honestly (Score:5, Informative)
First off, IBM and HP maintain their own JVMs (as did Microsoft until the Sun/MS lawsuit). Secondly, Apple insisted on being the one to port their JVM. Reading the blog post by Gosling will tell you that. And thirdly, they didn't do it "for free" (at least in the early days - not sure about the last few years). I was at Javasoft back then, and Sun funded some Apple engineers to work on the port.
I don't have a problem with someone else (say, Sun^H^H^HOracle) doing the port - it would be more timely, up-to-date, etc. I just wish they would have had a something worked out saying "We're not gonna support our JVM, and Oracle will be doing this starting on ...
Re:Oh honestly (Score:4, Insightful)
That was also back when Sun worked with other JVM's, as opposed to suing them out of existence like Oracle is doing. Apple probably lost those engineers and Oracle probably came to them and said now you have to pay us for the privilege.
Why are we blaming Apple when it's Oracle's policies that driving this particular change.
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That was also back when Sun worked with other JVM's, as opposed to suing them out of existence like Oracle is doing.
Huh? The grandparent specifically mentioned that Sun sued Microsoft's Java [javaworld.com] out of existence!
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Because it's their loss if they don't.
Windows has a major market already in business desktops, their JVM can't be dropped. Linux has a major market in the server business, their JVM can't be dropped. Apple has nothing to convince Oracle to support their JVM.
Re:Oh honestly (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, as Gosling correctly points out, the claim that apple is the only one doing this is simply not true. IBM, HP, and many other vendors supply their own implementation of Java for their hardware/systems. Microsoft did too for a long time, until they tried "embrace and extend" on the platform and Sun shut them down. Until that happened, the only JVM sun built was for solaris it seems, and maybe the linux version...
Trying to claim "oh poor apple, they've done all this work for free while everyone else just got a free ride from Sun" is pretty disingenuous given the actual history of JVM implementations.
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Yes and No... (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that their marketshare has grown, and Sun/Oracle does a decent and/or better than Apple did job of keeping it updated for other supported platforms, it seems likely that support will actually improve.
However, in the case of Apple, it isn't hard (or, typically, incorrect) to view anything that they do as being in service of their single-vendor-golden-cage control freak ideology. On the mobile, it is cryptographically enforced. On the desktop, the intent seems fairly clear to start with the soft sell "The Apple Store isn't the only way, just the best one" saith Jobs, and abrupt terminations of distribution of 3rd party technology are likely part of that.
Server/corporate users of OSX, rare but not nonexistent beasts, should be celebrating right now, since they'll now have actual Java, not Apple half-assery; but it is also likely the case that this is an attempt to make java an even more obscure and peripheral aspect of the OSX experience in general(in the same way that x11 is available; but is considered about as "un-Apple" as firing up Parallels, and probably less common).
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In fact calling JVM, which is one of the coolest and technically most sophisticated technologies (JIT, hotspot) invented by man to date, legacy is idiotic (as opposed to the 80s objective c technology). But, then again Mac users are clueless about technology, so you can tell t
What about Brocade Fiber Channel Switches? (Score:2)
They use Java exclusively for their management interface..
Oh that's right.. no one uses OSX in the server world anyway.
Apple isn't doing Sun's work for them.... (Score:3, Informative)
If someone else, including Sun/Oracle want to start maintaining a Java for OS X release they absolutely can - it just won't be available via OS X's automatic update scheme any longer (and won't be something Apple is paying for).
Re:Apple isn't doing Sun's work for them.... (Score:5, Informative)
and I explain:
Your view would make a good Apple PR position but doesn't address the actual complexities of the situation.
Say good buy to hope of any java app in mac store (Score:2)
Say good buy to hope of any java app in the new mac os app store And maybe even in web browsers in the app store.
Time to install Linux... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmmm.... installing Linux on my shiny new MacBook Pro that work gave is starting to become more and more attractive.
I agree with a lot of others on this. My group (at a fortune 500 company) has recently started allowing engineers to use Macs and many have chosen to do so. Many other groups in our company have been opting for macs as well.
It's disappointing to see Apple hyper focus on shiny gizmos. One risk they are taking is that the cloud computing revolution hasn't fully panned out yet. If they have all of their eggs in one basket with the mobile devices and some killer apps in the cloud come out that eat into that market share somehow, then they'll be screwed.
However, a more likely scenario is that Apple has been enjoying a lead in the gizmo arena because they've been the first to do it "right" from the consumer's point of view. Unless they can keep innovating to keep ahead of the market catching up with them so that they are viewed is "The" device, they risk losing their market share to the ubiquity of other high-quality devices. Which is why they are so adamant about things like exclusivity and closed platforms.
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The side-effects are that Java developers won't use Macs. (Since I use neither Java nor Apple products, I don't really care that mcuh, but I think Apple might be shooting itself in the foot.)
Of much more concern is the App store for Mac OS X idea. Apple is turning Mac OS X into a closed iPhone-like system. I guess my anti-Apple rant [skoll.ca] will soon apply to Mac OS X as well as the iP* systems.
Re:What are the negative consequences? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What are the negative consequences? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then Oracle should get right on that if they want to truly be a common platform for all OS.
Ok. Let me indulge a little paranoia. (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple and various others these days seem to be teaming up with Microsoft to attack their common 'threats'. So you see Facebook and MS going after Google, Oracle going after Android (to the benefit of Apple, and incidently MS), Apple ditching Flash (to the benefit of MS and Silverlight). And now Apple ditching Java. Who benefits from that? Well, anybody that's threatened by truly cross-platform stuff.
Here's where my paranoia kicks in. I think Apple only hates cross-platform stuff when one of those platf
Re:Ok. Let me indulge a little paranoia. (Score:5, Insightful)
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And by way, the open source JVMs are not as incomplete as you imagine, considering they are being used by the majority of Disney's internet engineering team to develop the infrastructure.
It depends on whether they're doing the GUI parts. The non-GUI parts of Java are relatively easy to keep in synch, as OSX looks enormously like other Unixes. But the GUI parts are difficult, as the OSX GUI model is quite different to that used in both classic Unix/X11 and Windows. That wouldn't be a problem for an internet engineering team - GUIs aren't needed for doing servers - but it does mean that the incompleteness is likely to be patchy; some apps will be much more heavily affected than others (and GU
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Re:What are the negative consequences? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Gosling is correct.
Why would Oracle care to port JVM/JDK to Mac on their own, especially now, when so many developers that used to work on Java are gone from Sun/Oracle after the buyout deal?
Actually Oracle doesn't care about Mac platform, it cares about its money making business - databases, ERP software etc. and what percentage of that runs on any Mac server exactly?
The only single reason for Oracle to care is to try and preserve more Java developers, which they probably do care about, because so many of their own products use Java. But do they really care about developers on Macs? I don't see it.
Re:What are the negative consequences? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes they do because many of their enterprise Java GUI products run on Mac. They've also made a major commitment to JavaFX 2.0, and ignoring 20% of the desktop market would make no sense to them.
The question is whether Apple will give them their OS X Swing implementation, or whether Oracle will have to write it themselves.
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If they don't care about OSX then why do they release their database server for it?
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To play advocate of the devil here, since I care less about either Apple nor Java, isn't the side effect that Apple's competition in the phones world got a boot from the platform that is owned by the owners of iPhone?
I do not know what the implications are on the longer term but on the short term it causes their competition to spend time setting up new development environments, and diminished looking over the shoulders into the Apple technical world as developers are not going to keep up with that if they c
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To play advocate of the devil here, since I care less about either Apple nor Java, isn't the side effect that Apple's competition in the phones world got a boot from the platform that is owned by the owners of iPhone?
I do not know what the implications are on the longer term but on the short term it causes their competition to spend time setting up new development environments, and diminished looking over the shoulders into the Apple technical world as developers are not going to keep up with that if they can't work from that platform anyway.
Maybe it would help if you rewrote that in English.
You're probably 100% correct, that does read as if it was written by someone for whom English is not a first language (or even a second language; it looks very much like a babelfish translation).
I think what the GP is saying is that this could be an anti-competitive move by Apple, in an attempt to both get a 'competing platform' (Java) off of the iPhone, and keep rival developers from easily working out Apple's technical details.
I'm not entirely sure that I'm accurate in thinking that, but I'm not sure how
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Re:What are the negative consequences? (Score:5, Funny)
The side-effects of course are that Apple users will no longer enjoy the benefits of attractive looking, quick starting, super fast applications that run (at least) 500% faster than their C++ or even hand-crafted assembler counterparts. It's all due to the latest clever 'Just-in-time' JVMs that are to be released any centu^H^H^H^H^H day now... they'll be able to dynamically compile and optimise the program in the background, without any performance impact what-so-ever.
Apple code quality will also likely suffer, as programmers are forced to move from modern 'type-safe' languages like Java (except for that bit where you have to cast from Object to your desired type every few lines) that strongly enforce modern techniques like exceptions (except that bit where people just catch them and do nothing) to dead languages such as C++ that have all manner of dangerous features like unsigned types.
Thus... Macs as a platform? Unlikely to last another couple of years
Re:What are the negative consequences? (Score:5, Insightful)
The side-effects are that Java developers won't use Macs. (Since I use neither Java nor Apple products, I don't really care that mcuh, but I think Apple might be shooting itself in the foot.)
Of much more concern is the App store for Mac OS X idea. Apple is turning Mac OS X into a closed iPhone-like system. I guess my anti-Apple rant [skoll.ca] will soon apply to Mac OS X as well as the iP* systems.
Keep ranting. Nobody gives a shit.
Users want to be able to install apps with one click and have them just work, whether they are native apps or Web apps. Apple has done a ton of work to enable that on both their own Cocoa platform and the common HTML5 platform, which they have done at least as much as anybody else to realize. Apps that depend on Flash or Java don't fit this model. Not only are there various versions of the runtimes which may or may not run the app you're trying to use, and not only are there various security issues that come up regularly, the user is expected to play I-T guy and sort that all out.
If you are a Java developer, you can run Java on your own server and provide an HTML5 interface on the client, or a Cocoa interface on Apple platforms. That is how Apple themselves use Java. Cocoa and HTML5 both have auto installs and auto updates built-in, and are therefore consistent with consumer use. Whatever is on the server can be as nerdy as you like, but what is on the client has to be consumer grade. Flash and Java are not consumer grade.
Understand that Apple makes consumer products. Would you expect a TV or DVD Player to have Flash and Java and expect the user to update them regularly? That is insanity. So you're not going to have those runtimes on iPads and MacBooks either. These devices don't have I-T support people. The users don't know what Flash or Java is.
So you missed the point entirely. Apple's App Stores are not about being closed, they are about working for consumers 100% of the time with absolutely zero I-T work. Apple makes very, very little money from App Store. The incentive is not to close it, but rather to make it work perfectly. Same with Apple's Web app platform, which is 100% open it's pure W3C HTML5 and ISO MPEG-4 media so that it works 100% of the time for consumers with zero I-T work. You don't need various browsers you switch to for some sites, you don't need to update your Flash or Java, you don't need to download codecs, the one in your GPU is the only one you need. Flash and Java don't make the cut in consumer computing. Blaming Apple for that is just denialism, a way to put your nerd head in the sand and wish the clock would turn back.
Flamebait, seriously? MOD UP (Score:3, Insightful)
It's amazing how much of the geek community is completely at a loss for why Apple is so successful. Somehow it's impossible that the user experience they provide is what people want so it must be their marketing.
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It's amazing how much of the geek community is completely at a loss for why Apple is so successful. Somehow it's impossible that the user experience they provide is what people want so it must be their marketing.
I recently managed a group of student workers at an IT shop, and it was a real reminder of the "I'm a genius, everyone else is an idiot" phase that most geeks go through (hopefully) early on in their development.
I think this essentially what you're seeing. Someone who has the time and inclination to figure out any UI that comes across their path will never understand people who have different priorities. Clearly, everyone else is an idiot.
It's jealousy... (Score:3, Interesting)
When you boil it down, for most people it's just jealousy. I hate to sound like a smug asshole, but I'm at a loss for what else it is.
When Microsoft does something like a typical douche or even something geeks just don't like you get a very simple "M$ sucks" thread. When Apple does something geeks don't like... the reaction is very different. There's this weird mixture of entitlement, hurt and, "But Apple, I weewy, weewy wuv Macs! How can you do this to me!?" (Oh, and there's the crowd that's always hated A
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The side-effects are that Java developers won't use Macs. (Since I use neither Java nor Apple products, I don't really care that mcuh, but I think Apple might be shooting itself in the foot.)
Of much more concern is the App store for Mac OS X idea. Apple is turning Mac OS X into a closed iPhone-like system. I guess my anti-Apple rant [skoll.ca] will soon apply to Mac OS X as well as the iP* systems.
Prediction: Even if, ten years from now, the Mac platform is still just as open and general purpose as it was prior to the invention of the Mac App Store concept, people like you will continue to make factually baseless comments like this and continue to be modded "Insightful" on a daily basis during the entire intervening ten years.
If Apple is actually stupid enough to try and lock down a general purpose computing platform that is competing with other general purpose computing platforms, I will be happy to
Re:What are the negative consequences? (Score:5, Informative)
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The Eclipse ecosystem is probably the easiest of the bunch to get running with good results on an open source jvm because it does not use AWT/Swing and would not have to use the X-Windows subsystem that the open source jvms use at the moment. SWT Libraries are native Cocoa, more or less, connected via jni.
Re:What are the negative consequences? (Score:4, Interesting)
I kinda summed up [knowyourmeme.com] the consequences, OK i was pessimistic but I also had forgotten apple used to have offerings in the server market. A server that can't do tomcat natively? hmmmm.
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Can't run OO.o (or LibreOffice) for a start.
Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
You an run the core product, but only a few of the modules that really provide the power to the OO platform, like highly integrated database-document interaction. But the vast majority of Apple users generally don't have those kinds of technical skills anyway.
Open office is a basically a business application designed to serve as an open alternative to the basic Microsoft suite of business products. Apple sees its future in the trendy gadget, cool phones and vido-games markets, not in general technical/business computing. As a percentage of their sales, developers are just a tiny fraction of their user-base, so why go through the extra expense of catering to them, when you can develop a closed-shop end-user general consumer market instead?
No Big Deal Really (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not a big deal really.
Software developers aren't really all that important to Apple market share anymore as they have been moving toward becoming more of a source for trendy tech gadgets rather than a major force in computer driven software for some time now. They intend to phase out of computers completely as there is more money to be made with iPhones, toy tablets and other trendy gizmos. They see no future in the business world of databases, web-development and science-based applications, but rather in the end-user market phone, games and entertainment space. Apple intends not to compete with Microsoft or Linux. With OS X, their primary targets are increasingly Sony, Nitendo, Nokia, Samsung and the like.
Lets face it modern American youth are really no longer receiving the kind of educations that they would need to remain current in the computer-tech world. Jobs is just adapting to market realities and the fact he has a captive market of folks who recognize that they can't really be "cool" unless they buy Apple products.
Re:No Big Deal Really (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not a big deal really.
Software developers aren't really all that important to Apple market share anymore as they have been moving toward becoming more of a source for trendy tech gadgets rather than a major force in computer driven software for some time now. They intend to phase out of computers completely as there is more money to be made with iPhones, toy tablets and other trendy gizmos. They see no future in the business world of databases, web-development and science-based applications, but rather in the end-user market phone, games and entertainment space. Apple intends not to compete with Microsoft or Linux. With OS X, their primary targets are increasingly Sony, Nitendo, Nokia, Samsung and the like.
Lets face it modern American youth are really no longer receiving the kind of educations that they would need to remain current in the computer-tech world. Jobs is just adapting to market realities and the fact he has a captive market of folks who recognize that they can't really be "cool" unless they buy Apple products.
You have no idea what you are blathering about. Apple is in no way getting out of computers. As always, they simply do not sell computers to I-T, they sell them to consumers and creatives. Nobody else fills that need.
The apps that sell to iOS users are made on Macs. iOS itself is made on Macs. The music and movies that sell to iOS users are made on Macs. Apple is the leading provider of pro video editing tools by volume, and the leading provider of consumer video editing tools by volume. They are the leading provider of music and audio editing tools by volume. All of this stuff runs only on the Mac. They are the leading provider of graphics workstations. They sell 90% of the high-end Intel PC's sold every year. They sell 20% of the Intel PC's sold at US retail every year, in spite of having no low end model. Their Mac business by itself would be 110 in the Fortune 500 if it were a standalone company. It is not only not going away, it is growing and it is more important than ever.
Java doesn't have anything to do with any of this. The concerns of I-T and Slashdot nerds don't have anything to do with all of this. Get it through your head that there are computer users that are not part of the I-T market and the Mac is the computer for those users. Not because it is trendy (you moron) but because it satisfies the needs of those users. It has a pro video subsystem, a pro audio subsystem, a pro graphics subsystem, a pro Web development subsystem, it can be maintained without I-T support. None of those things are true of any other computer.
It is absolutely wonderful if your computing needs are satisfied with a generic box running Ubuntu, but grow up enough to realize that other users needs are only satisfied with a Mac.
Re:No Big Deal Really (Score:5, Informative)
It has a pro video subsystem, a pro audio subsystem, a pro graphics subsystem, a pro Web development subsystem
I agree with you, but it is very difficult to have "pro" Web development subsystem if you can't run Java apps. The Amazon EC2 tools and the YUI Javascript compressor are two examples of staple web dev tools that are Java-based, not to mention the popular Eclipse IDE which some use.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Jesus, give me a break. So if a company doesn't make the most ugly, cheap ass, garbage, 'hackable' products, then they're toys. Right... You're right, this is no big deal.
The world is not going to end - it's just changing. So what, you're stuck with Java 6 for another year on a Mac while Oracle get's one out. Big deal. You can still run a business with coders on a Mac, using Java - I have friends that are still in business after this 'announcement' (shocker!). This is all just sensationalized bullshit.
Now f
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft has never supported a JVM for Windows in the first place; at most, Apple is now in the same position, not worse. Besides not having a control of the market like MS does.
I'm not an Apple apologist, but it's not comparable at all.
Re:Antitrust lawsuit? (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? What history are you reading from? Microsoft very much did have their own JVM implementation for many years, then Sun started anti-trust litigation against Microsoft regarding it. Sometime in 2001, Microsoft settled and agreed to stop distributing it.
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Really (Score:4, Insightful)
I develop Java on Windows quite well thank you. Yes there was a dust up, when MIcrosoft tied to grab a hold of the language through proprietary VM, but they lost that suit and Windows remains a great platform for Java development and likely to stay that way, otherwise many customers like me will simply migrate to Ubuntu or another system capable of running Java, which would further erode Windows market share, particularly in the business applications market.
Thats why Apple wants to kill Java. They don't believe in end-users having that kind of choice. For them software and computer gadgets are all about closed and captive, rather than open markets. Just check out the dearth of really useful, but incredibly expensive stuff in the iPhone apps market that only do things that are Apple-approved. For many end users thats fine as they just want a cool app or gadget that works. They have no real technical understanding beyond pressing "buttons". They do other things with their lives.
Apple has become the trendy tech for the non-technical. Apple sees their market there rather than in general purpose computer manufacturing. Its a good move for Jobs. In his lifetime, things are likely to pretty much stay that way. For people who expand the boundaries of what you can do with computing technology Apple is becoming a closed, shrinking market, except for those developing games and trendy gizmo, entertainment software. For them in the long run Apple is increasingly becoming a dead market for significant technical innovation. For folks who are primarily interested in web-centric technical computing, Apple is really longer "cool" and really has no future, which is not the same thing as saying they won't have a sizable market or profits for some time to come. Look at Sony and Nintendo, they are still making money, but no one would claim they serve as development platforms for innovate software other than games and video entertainment.
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I am going to imagine the praise that would have gone to Steve if he opened up the source of his java implementation instead. Then leave it to the community and if it lags simply tell people: java is dying, use (technology X) instead.
SAME EFFORT, better image overall. This saddens me as I attacked apple but also appreciated their tech for a few happy years.
No antitrust lawsuit IMO. Instead be honest and put a sticker on apple products saying "warning, the producer has the means and the will to control what
MS pulled support for Java years ago (Score:2)
...some time after they got sued by Sun for trying to "embrace and extend" it by adding incompatible extensions.
But then:
I know that's technically only one reason but it is so important that I thought that I'd mention it three times. If Oracle or IBM doesn't pick up Java support for Mac then you get to vot
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue here isn't Java itself but the fact that this is a prelude to treating Java applications like some sort of pariah by being excluded from the "Mac Store" and being excluded from Apple's new answer to apt-get.
This is about treating Java-in-general as a second class citizen on MacOS.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is about treating Java-in-general as a second class citizen on MacOS.
It is and has for a long time been a second-class citizen on Mac OS X. I can think of no major (or even many minor) applications for the OS X platform that are written in Java. It hasn't proven itself necessary. It's costly and difficult for Apple to maintain for no tangible benefit when they can simply provide the hooks for the actual owner of Java to implement their own package if they so desire.
Where's the beef?
Re:Antitrust lawsuit? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is about treating Java-in-general as a second class citizen on MacOS.
It is and has for a long time been a second-class citizen on Mac OS X.
Java has been third-class for a LONG time, on pretty much every platform. Even flash gets WAY more attention.
You could remove Java from most people's PCs and the only side effect would be more disk space.
And on that "universal" platform known as the web browser? When's the last time you used a java applet? Is anyone who doesn't live in mom's basement even writing them any more?
-- Barbie
Re: (Score:3)
Same thing on the server end - I don't need java to pretend that I'm running java to respond to a request from a java app/applet.
Java is on the way out. It was a good idea, poorly implemented, and never found a real calling. First, it was for set-top boxes; when that didn't work, it was re-purposed for web apps, then a general "write once, bring any machine
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Think of it - Germany, with 1/16 the population of China, and with a much shorter work day and work week, and 6 weeks minimum vacation, exports as much as China. [slashdot.org]
The 40-hour work week in the US has to go. It is a job destroyer. Productivity gains over the last 30 years should have been shared with the workers who actually do the producing - they have not been, to the destruction of the middle class
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
nope, in 1995 or 1998 MS Java was bundled with the os. The SUN vs MSFT lawsuit was the result of the half-assed bundling.
Re:Bleet! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's it!
Make a service called Bleeter! "The Voice of the Sheep!" You can get modded if other Sheep like your Bleet!
Maybe we can get Yasmine Bleeth to advertise for it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple has made PLENTY of bad design decisions. Plenty of lists: here [v3.co.uk], here [telegraph.co.uk], etc.
-- Barbie
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Honestly ... if you're so paranoid, don't buy Apple products. Or don't upgrade. Problem solved. But as a former Java developer who worked exclusively on a mac ... I can say that the Apple has slowly been distancing themselves from Java for awhile now. The fact that it took them two goddamn years to release Java6 was pretty telling and when they did release it, it was only for 64bit machines. It was truly maddening, especially considering how opaque apple can be.
But this fear of lockdown? That's just t
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think you are using the word "deprecated" correctly. I think you mean "obsolete" or "old", but not "deprecated".
Objective-C is not deprecated because neither Apple nor its original developers have deprecated it. Deprecation is the act of marking a software as having been superseded, and recommended that its use be avoided. It requires an agency to have denoted it so. Whereas "obsolete" is simply an adjective that does not require an agency.