06 Dec
Posted by: Brandon Harper in: Disciplines, Java, Languages, OS X, Operating Systems, Software Engineering, Tech News, Tips, Hacks, & Tricks
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).
2 Responses
Sam Halliday
07|Dec|2007 1Oh come on… a BSD port of SUN’s Java 6 is no comparison to Apple’s port. I am dying for Java 6, but I won’t be touching this. At the very best, graphics support will be via X11, and god only knows how it handles things like loading of native libs.
F. James
07|Dec|2007 2Sam, what do you mean, “handles things like loading of native libs” ? What could possibly be odd about how it does that?
As for Apple’s port, I guess I don’t see where there’s “no comparison”. If you’re OK with X11 swing, then it sure seems like a reasonable option.
You sound like a mighty nay sayer. For many developer’s needs, this looks perfect.
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