Standing in the Field @ Valley Forge

Standing in the Field

Notes from SJS Application Server Field Engineering

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Tuesday June 29, 2004
Disappointment

Well the opening keynotes are over, both at JavaOne and Apple WWDC. I know it was probably an unrealistic expectation, but I was hoping that Apple would announcing that Apple OS X 10.4 (codename Tiger) would support Java 5.0 (codename Tiger). And even more unrealistically, I was hoping that Apple would announce an early access edition of Java 5.0 for Mac.

I'm doing the majority of my Java development on the Mac these days. All of the major IDEs are running on Mac these days. (Including Sun's NetBeans and Studio Creator. I'm glad that we have officially blessed the Mac port of Studio Creator: I've been running an EA version of months now.) There are even several sessions here at JavaOne just focused on the tips and tricks of developing Java on the Mac.

But, unfortunately, that has meant that I have been falling behind in experimenting with Java 5.0, which is currently only available on Solaris, Linux, and Windows. I do have beta2 of Java 5.0 running on my Solaris box, but that is a headless box so there's a little extra hassle in developing there.

Enough making excuses. Java 5.0 is definitely the focus of a lot of JavaOne. It is a huge release for Java and the benefits to both administrators (performance ergonomics) and developers (new language constructs) are going to be very compelling. So I promise to spend a lot more time learning the ins and outs of Java 5.0 going forward.

I'm sure that Apple will release a Java 5.0 JDK. I'll probably have to wait at least until this fall when the final version of Java 5.0 ships. But I think that Apple understands the importance of Java.

(2004-06-29 09:28:23.0) Permalink