[sadie]

I work for a company developing cross-platform Java. They don't give two and half hoots for the Mac, but I do. We're developing in Java 1.3, and will be moving to 1.4 as soon as it's finalized (Q1 2002, apparently). And yes, we really do need the new features in it, it isn't just to be fasionable.

I need to know: how soon after the main 1.4 release will OS X support it?

[Angus_D]

Aren't you meant to be an Apple employee?

[sadie]

When did i ever claim that? If i was an Apple employee I'd be avoiding all the "we want this now!" threads! I try to helpful and authoritative, but only because I'm always right.

No, i just work for a little software house. In Java, oddly enough.

[sadie]

And by the way - I REALLY NEED THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION!

[AirSluf]

[sadie]

So would anyone be willing to tell me? Anyone at Apple willing to leak in their favour?

[Millennium]

Traditionally, Apple has been extremely slow to respond to new Java releases. A lot of this was because they had to write MRJ from scratch; they got no help from Sun in that regard. The MacOS architecture was too different from that of Windows or even Unix to port over, so it had to be a ground-up rewrite.

However, since OSX uses a port of Sun's HotSpot JVM, they'll probably be better about it from this point on, because they can actually use Sun's code, at least in some places. My guess is it'll still be a couple of months, though.

And as a sidenote: Do you use J2SE or J2EE? That could affect things; Apple hasn't gotten J2EE support working in OSX yet.

[Kristoff]

sadie:
Apple has said they are working on 1.4. You aren't the only one who needs it. They were more concerned about fixing 1.3.1 bugs first though. I would expect a couple month delay after the final Sun version.

Millennium:J2EE works fine on OS X. Has since 10.0. I use JBoss and Tomcat. Everything works fine. Just because Apple doesn't ship an EJB container or J2EE app server doesn't mean that J2EE doesn't work! Apple would rather see people use WebObjects, so they aren't going to push J2EE, but it works fine.

[Millennium]

Last I checked, neither JBoss nor Tomcat used any J2EE-specific stuff, so they'd work anyway. I could be wrong in that, I guess...

[int69h]

Orion has worked on OSX since at least the public beta. You can't deploy for free with it, but the license fees are reasonable.

[absmiths]

Originally posted by Millennium:
<STRONG>Last I checked, neither JBoss nor Tomcat used any J2EE-specific stuff, so they'd work anyway. I could be wrong in that, I guess...</STRONG>

JBoss and Tomcat both offer J2EE services - namely Enterprise Java Beans, Java Server Pages, Servlets and the like. True, the Mac OS does not have a Java 2 Enterprise Edition SDK, but the API's work just fine under X.

[absmiths]

Originally posted by sadie:
<STRONG>And yes, we really do need the new features in it, it isn't just to be fasionable.
</STRONG>

To be honest, the best way to write cross-platform code is to stick with 1.3 because of the risk of this very problem. What exact 1.4 features do you need? Many companies have managed to write some pretty impressive software using nothing more than JDK 1.2 (or even JDK 1.1, heaven forbid!) Besides, just because the JDK ships doesn't mean you can ship products that require it - remember the problems with JDK 1.2 and JDK 1.3 when they first shipped? I would hate to have to tell my customers to wait for 1.4.1.

[sadie]

<STRONG>What exact 1.4 features do you need?</STRONG>

• Chained Exceptions (yes, this is vital)
• Mouse Wheel support
• Fixes to the standard bug in JOptionPane in 1.3 (not mac only)
• Better performance for Reflection, particularly Method.invoke();
• And therefore better performance in the DynamicProxy class (important)

The fact is, the company has decided to use 1.4 as soon as possible. I'm the only guy who gives a smeg about the Mac.

[sadie]

Oh, and one more - although I'm not sure if 1.4 has this yet:

• Serializable stack traces on exceptions

That one is seriously vital to what we're doing.

[sadie]

And while I'm at it, these look rather nice:

• Language support for assertions
• Regular expressions
• Hot swapping of classes while debugging

You see, Sun have been quietly making lots of useful additions in recent versions. But I can only dream of this one...

• Generic programming

[ 11-14-2001: Message edited by: sadie ]