I have a PC laptop, which has been my personal and (in a way) best partner for work and everything that involves the needs of information in this days; But now, due my work, it seems that the time to change it has come, maybe to something that gives me best performance for the kind of work that I do, which in my case is Java and Database development. For this, one of the first things I tend to think for my new laptop is to get better battery life, good looking, more ram, better processor, which get you to the eternal conflict of price/performance in Intel vs AMD, or sometimes to have or not a dedicated graphic card ( for some occasional game :) ).  When you study these facts today, and also reviewing some history, you finally have to decide for a PC or a MAC.  Historically MAC OS has been the best non-windows platform for the user, also the most good looking laptops, and even into the Java world, has been a favorite for long time Java Developers, but, today we have more than Windows or Mac, things are changed, and there’s an important point where I get stuck; Which of the OS platforms today is the most adequate for Java development?

I know it’s hard and even irresponsible to say or establish that one platform will be better or worse to develop as “the” Java environment; however, we can take a snapshot in this moment. In these days we have (at least in my opinion) 4 mayor platforms to develop: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Open Solaris (not precisely in that order). These OS’s despite the fact of having different market share in different levels, and thaw market share figures are subject to many factors that can affect the resulting pattern, these represent surely over the 99% of the Java development platforms today.   Each one of these has its strong points and weak points (some of them more weak than strong) from this point of view as a Java development platform.  So let’s take a look at every one of them:

Windows in one side, is the most standard OS in homes around the world, so probably almost any computer you buy, will be delivered (like it or not) with some version of this OS. Now, as Java developing platform, it has an easy installation method for almost every developing tool available, and also any distribution of the JDK, JEE and the wireless toolkit for J2ME, thanks to the support from SUN. The dark side of it is that it has so many security issues, viruses, and problems of stability which sometimes makes java developer going crazy just to keep the system up.  The other problem is the scalability of the system, in most of cases, if not all, big java developments will not be hosted in windows servers, but in UNIX platforms or equivalent.  Just these two big factors make windows a not very good choice for the Java developer.

On the other side of the equation we have MAC OS, possibly the most reliable OS for the end user today, specially the MAC OS X Tiger 10.4.6, which due the Mac-Intel agreement uses over a year know Intel chips.  Mac OS X has some great features for the Java developer, first in has a UNIX kernel, which allows developing in an environment similar to production, where the java program will be used.  The other thing is that it has a complete integration with Java, allowing developing application directly for MAC OS, and perhaps the most important part, is the stability of the system, and the lack of viruses.   These facts made Mac OS one of the preferred platforms for developers who can afford a Mac.  But now the things have changed a bit; one problem that Apple always has it’s to keep updated the release of the JDK to the Apple platform, since SUN doesn’t have access to the Mac OS code to coordinate it, which means developers have to wait over a year until Mac releases the new version.   Right now, Apple is working to release the new version of Mac OS X 10.5 called Leopard (possibly in March), that among other new things incorporate a new graphical UI and the new version of Java 6.  So, in this moment to buy a Mac is not a very good choice to the Java Developer, considering that the Open Sourcing of Java will lead to more new versions of Java with possibly bigger changes, which maybe means more problems if Apple continues with the no-collaborative work with SUN or the rest of the JCP companies.    

On the new part of the equation, enters two participants, who comes from different worlds, one is Linux and the other Open Solaris.  These two, are both in a way children from the same father, UNIX. But as the fairy tale, one was the prince and the other the pauper.  The prince was Open Solaris, created by SUN, a true blue blooded derived directly from the original UNIX, with lots of fantastic features, and big-server dominance.  The other called pauper is Linux; this new baby as grown from a UNIX derived kernel, along with a new era in computing; the era of sharing.  Now these days, both share the same idea of open sourcing and they both point to dominate both the hi-end and low-end computer industry.  Apart from its internal differences (which certainly analyze in a future post ) Solaris has some advantages over Linux in terms of Java, it has a better integration with the environment(due it’s SUN support), and its binary compatibility it’s much better than Linux, not to mention that Solaris its more commonly used in the production world. The problem with Solaris compared with Linux is that it’s quite new in the Open Sourcing world, so in there’s a small problem of hardware compatibility and tools.   Even thaw, both of them lack of easy maintenance and user-friendly tools compared with Mac OS or Windows, not to mention support in the case of Linux, which not makes much easy to the Java Developer.

So, after all this, what can I conclude? Well, certainly I can’t say that there’s one big platform for Java Development, especially due the surge of larger communities every day in the Open Source world and the changes that Apple has been doing lately; But, I can say that at least in this moment all the companies are making big changes to help the Java developers community to have better tools and more reliable OS platforms to develop.  Today the world its open, and sharing it’s vital for a healthy software development, so, in that case, maybe in the future, we see more developer specific OS releases, and as soon as the big enterprises understand this (specially the more closed to that, you know who I mean), much healthy the software ecosystem will be for Java.  So, what I will buy for my next computer? I think that for now I’ll have to save much money as I can to afford the biggest amount of memory and hard drive for these systems….

Linux Java Community : http://community.java.net/linux/ 

Mac Java Community : http://community.java.net/mac/