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).
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Oh 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.
Sam, 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.