Java Performance Tuning Course
Chania Crete, May 17-20, 2010
Sun Extreme Learning EXL-2025
Houston, December 1-4,2009
New York, December 8-11, 2009
Washington DC, January 5-8, 2010
San Francisco, January 11-14
Anti-if
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Java Lobby plea to Apple
The JavaLobby has just published a critical view on Apple's support for Java. After just having finished screencasting a demo for the upcoming TSSJS in Barcelona on my Windows desktop I'd have to say that there isn't much that JL has said that I could take issue with. Why was I forced to screencast on my Windows desktop?
My primary machine is a MacBook Pro. I do have the latest version of Java that Apple has to offer but it is so old and buggy that what I need to demo simply won't work. Since I'll be traveling with the MacBook Pro the best option seemed to be; screencast the demo on Windows. I can't say that I like demoing screencasts. Of course things will work as intended but what if my intentions change. For example, screencasting doesn't help if someone asks a question that you could adapt a real demo to answer.
I did manage to talk to an Apple employee while at JavaONE who had some familiarity with the situation. All he could tell me was that Apple was doing something about it and wait and see. If the wait and see is what was announced at WWDC then all I can say is a big "so what". You've just forced me to upgrade to Leopard so that I can work with a more up to date JVM.
The biggest pickle has to be for the Eclipse Foundation. Without Carbon the most popular IDE won't run on a Mac. But there must be plenty of other software that will be in the same position so it just doesn't seem reasonable that Carbon will be deprecated. If it is deprecated expect to see a lot of Mac hardware showing up on eBay. With much better Java support for Linux, switching to Ubuntu, RedHat or some other variant is starting to look very appealing.
I'm also wondering what people will be thinking when they see an obvious Windows based screencast running on a Mac. If Apple is interested in attracting more developers I doubt they want to see demonstrations like the one that I'm going to give. And to those who maybe watching believe me when I say this, I'd rather it be live.
The one good question that has come out of the forums is; with OpenJDK, is it time that we (the community) take over Java development for the MAC?
No one will sell their stuff on eBay, be serious. We'll just install
Ubuntu on our excellent Mac hardware. If I was serious about running
Linux, a Mac Pro as the hardware would be hard to beat.
So when Windows Presentation Foundation showed up the Eclipse guys jumped
right on it and implemented SWT. The could have said - "Na, we'll just
stick with good 'ol Win32 forever". Why do a different set of rules apply
to Apple. They should just port to Cocoa and be done with it. Yea, I've
read all the history about the decision to go Carbon - and they're all
quite legitimate reasons. But things move forward...
SWT is dead ? bla bla bla bla..
Just like what Vista was comin' out.
Eclipse can implement the new SWT very quickly..
SWT isn't necessary depending on the Carbon.