devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

UPDATE: I was up too late, and didn’t notice that it’s update 6 for Java, not Java 6. This is just another update for Java 5… *sigh*

I’ve been up pretty late doing a little work and tying-up some last minute Christmas shopping, and out of the blue this Apple update window popped-up:

I’m super glad to finally see an Apple release of Java 6! I’ve been developing with SoyLatte lately and was going to write a quick tutorial on how to get it up and running on MacOS X, so I guess I don’t necessarily need to do that now. Although given Apple’s secrecy about Java releases and the future of Java on MacOS X, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have an alternative around.

I’m still on Tiger– I assume Leopard users are seeing this update too?

For those many of you (including myself) who have been waiting almost a year now for Java 6 to be properly supported on the Mac, the wait is over if you’re a developer– Landon Fuller has released SoyLatte 1.0, which is a port of FreeBSD Java 6 to MacOS X which will eventually end-up as part of the OpenJDK. This seemed to come together very quickly once Leopard came-out and was missing Java 6.

Though Java 6 didn’t provide quite as much new syntactic sugar as Java 5, the performance increases in Java 6 are pretty dramatic. I highly recommend giving Java 6 a look if you’re doing any development which runs on the JVM if you haven’t already switched.

Keep in mind that this is mostly a developers port as it’s not yet integrated into Cocoa, the MacOS X native GUI. Desktop applications will run under X11, but this is the next hurdle to tackle (though it seems to be a pretty big one).