Java on OS X for the uninformed
By uninformed, I count myself as number one. I’m writing this because I didn’t really get the whole Apple deprecating Java situation. It sounded serious, so I educated myself a bit. This post might be helpful for people who don’t understand what the big deal is. Turns out it’s really pretty simple.
So last week, Apple came out with this little announcement, which states the following:
As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the Java runtime ported by Apple and that ships with Mac OS X is deprecated. Developers should not rely on the Apple-supplied Java runtime being present in future versions of Mac OS X.
I’ve heard a number of people, even on respected tech podcasts, say things along the lines of, “It’s not really a big deal. It just means that Java won’t come pre-installed on your Mac. You’ll have to install it yourself. It’s like what they are doing with the Flash player. New Macs won’t ship with it, but there’s nothing stopping you from installing it yourself.”
This is very far from the truth. The question is, if Apple is not making Java for the Mac, what exactly are you going to install yourself? Let’s pop over to java.com and see what they have. http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp
Well, let’s see, we have installs for Windows, Solaris, and Linux…
And… oh there it is, OS X:
Oops. They tell you to go to Apple to get Java. Oracle currently maintains the other versions of Java listed above. They do not currently make a version of Java for OS X. Nor does anybody else. Apple’s stance seems to be “Oracle makes it for everyone else, they can make it for OS X now too. We’re done.” Thus far, Oracle has been silent. JDK 7 is targeted for mid-2011. Presumably it is well underway. Tossing an entire other platform into the schedule mid-stream is not a small undertaking. If Oracle steps up (one would assume they’re going to have to), I can’t imagine you’ll see JDK 7 released in the same time frame for Mac as for the other platforms. That would actually pretty much be business as usual for OS X. Apple has lagged behind in the release of their versions. I remember there were some things in Red5 that depended on JDK 6. Apple’s version lagged many months behind the official version, making it very difficult for some of my coworkers.
The other possibility is that OpenJDK will take it on. No word on that yet either.