I got alerted to this earlier today by my good friend Hendrik Schreiber, who develops awesome software for Mac OS X using Java: It seems Apple has killed Java on future OS X releases.
I can understand this, to a certain degree -- for Apple, Java is no longer a platform they want anyone to write apps in, so why waste engineering dollars to support it? On the other hand, there are tons of Java developers who use Macs, as shown by the Mac market share on any Java-centric conference in the last few years -- it's anything between 20 and 75%, with something as high as 90% among speakers. Of course it's going to hurt Apple if all of these folks switch to a different platform, and I do believe it might even be significant considering the network effect (as many of them, including me, were Mac OS X evangelists). I also know that in our company, innoQ, roughly 40 of our 50 developers are Mac OS X users, and it's likely none of them will be anymore two or three years from now. Given an average lifetime of 2 years per 2500 € box, that's about 50k we'll invest somewhere else. I suspect the same will be true for many other shops who use Java and other JVM languages (mostly JRuby in our case).
It's entirely possible the Apple folks have considered this, and come up with more reasons to drop Java than to sustain it. And of course it might all be a misunderstanding, or they might change their mind again, as it happened with other things, such as the App store rules. I just wouldn't bet on it.
From a personal perspective, it sucks very, very much. But hey, they are very good reasons for using Linux too, right?
I’m also doing Java development on a MBP ever since 10.1. Apple had a mixed history with it’s JDK anyway. Was it 1.5 or 1.6 which took really long to get ported?
It sure sucks not having a Apple JVM anymore but I guess this is where OpenJDK steps in. Time to look at it. At the moment I’m not too worried.
Oliver