Yesterday's storm of "No Java 6 on Leopard" posts, (including mine, and I don't even have a MacBook Pro) clouded the blogosphere a bit. I can't say we are not warned. I picked up the warning 11 days ago. Now it's the morning after, and I'm starting to see some more reasoned responses. I thought it would help to ask myself some questions, just to put things in perspective.
What's in it for Apple?
Apple spent a huge amount of resources to port Java 4 and 5 to Mac OS X. I've heard people claim that Apple has the most integrated Java on any platform. Almost all Java speakers in the traveling tours changed their laptops to MacBook Pros overnight.
Now that that's achieved, what other incentives are there for Apple to continue investing in a Java port?
None of the MacBook Pro carrying Java speakers, or anybody else, for that matter, wrote a single Java application that gave Apple any advantage—they are all cross-platform.
What's in it for Sun?
We use to laugh at Microsoft when they wrote MSDN articles like "Writing cross-platform Windows applications"—applications that runs on Windows 85 and Windows NT.
And now inevitably Java has come to the same juncture. Without Apple's continuing support, future versions of Java just won't be as cross-platform as they should be.
Given the importance of the MacOSX platform, I think everybody in Sun would agree that Java 6 on Leopard is of critical importance to Sun.
The question is, who should pay for it?
If it is up to me, Sun should pay for it, and Apple should do it. At least Sun should give Apple a little push in monetary terms.
What's in it for me or my clients?
Over the close to ten years of the Java phase of my career, I've worked for several clients. I've worked on Solaris, AIX, Tru64, Windows 95/NT/2K/XP, RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu. Not once was whether Java runs on the Mac mattered to me or my client.
It is cool that what I wrote would work on the Mac if Sun and Microsoft and the Linux community were to all close down tomorrow. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.
So is Leopard not having Java 6 a big deal?
For me, and I think most of the Java developers, not having Java 6 on Leopard for (what I hope is) a short period of time is not such a big deal. We'll just keep on using (or switching back to) Windows when we want to develop Java 6 code.
No Leopard for me, for now!
As much as I wanted to replace my trusty G4 mac mini, I'm going to wait a little while to decide my upgrade path. Through my crystal ball I see that by Christmas time, there should be Java 6 on Max OS X.
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