JavaGeek.org - apple tag

Apple joins OpenJDK effort

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:04:24 GMT

Three weeks ago Apple shocked the Java community by releasing a Java update on which the main "feature" was that they were deprecating Java on OS X. What this means is that Apple will no longer continue to develop its own Java Virtual Machine for its operating system. This caused many people to react against Apple, and think that Java development on Macs was dead, and even said that they would stop using a Mac. Interestingly enough, I didn't see actual cases of people dropping their MacBooks to the floor, stomping on them and then buying another laptop. And now they won't have to.

Today Oracle and Apple announced that most of the Apple JVM customizations for OS X will be contributed to the OpenJDK project, which is Oracle's main effort for evolving Java. From the press release:

The Java developer community can rest assured that the leading edge Java environment will continue to be available on Mac OS X in the future

They also mention that Java 6 will be available from Apple for the time being, including a release for their upcoming 10.6 release Lion. Java 7 and future Java releases will be available from Oracle. In short, Java will continue to be available on Macs in the near and the far future.

It is interesting that when the "Java is deprecated" news came, many people said that Apple was doing the same thing to Java that they were doing to Flash. But contrary to Flash, where Apple's CEO Steve Jobs publicly denounced it with an open letter, with Java they're still showing commitment in having a compatible JVM for OS X. So, Apple is not the evil company that wants to root out everything that doesn't come from inside their company.

Good news, Apple deprecated Java

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:54:06 GMT

Apple released an update to their Java environment on Wednesday, and among the changes the big one is that they have declared Java "deprecated". This has generated lots of buzz from the Java community, many of them saying that Apple is trying to kill Java on the Mac platform, or that OS X 10.7 "Lion" will not come with Java pre-installed, a change after almost 10 years of Apple providing Java runtime environments on every Apple computer sold. But besides the sparse description of the change in their release notes, Apple has said nothing to confirm or deny these allegations. As a Java developer working exclusively on a Mac for almost 3 years now, the news first came as a bit of a shock, but after careful consideration I think this is actually good news, or at least not the really bad news that people are talking about. Here's why.

In the beginning of the OS X era, Apple really cared about having a Java runtime on their operating system. At a time where more than 90% of the desktop computers were Windows machines and most of the desktop application development was done for this OS, having a solid JVM meant that Apple products could run Java-based desktop apps from day one, and it meant that companies would be able to have applications run on either platform as long as they did Java apps. So they licensed the JVM from Sun so that they could write, modify and make sure they had their own virtual machine from day one.

But now, with Apple focusing its effort on consumer devices like the iPhone/iPad, they don't really care about this anymore. Just last Tuesday, Jobs said that Mac revenue only accounts for 33% of their overall profit, and I think this number will decrease further as they keep bringing new devices to market. With less effort going into OS X, they will start trimming on the edges in order to be more competitive with less resources, and Java on the Apple is the first to go, but it probably won't be the last. This really is not surprising at all since Java on the Mac has been falling behind the official releases for quite some time. Java 6 was released almost 2 years behind, for starters, and that should have been a big clue of what happened on Wednesday.

But why is this good news, you ask? First, because as of Wednesday, we finally have an updated JDK that's on par with the official release, including all bug and security fixes, and this will continue to be the case at least until the end of life of Snow Leopard, according to Apple. Second, they haven't actually said that they will remove Java from Lion, they only said they will not release Apple-controlled versions. This means that we will have to rely on Oracle to produce an OS X version along with all the different versions which they're already producing (Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc). With Oracle and IBM already collaborating on improving Java, I don't think this is a big issue, but it's definitely up to Oracle to do this (or maybe not, since the development of Java is based on OpenJDK, an open source effort that means anyone could come and port everything to OS X). What I would really like is for Apple to contribute back their development efforts into OpenJDK.

There's really no reason to panic. Writing Java code on the mac should not be affected by Apple's announcement. If any, having the same JVM release version as other platforms will actually improve it. Writing for the mac also shouldn't be affected, unless you want your apps to be released through their upcoming App Store, since their leaked guidelines mention that it will not support having apps that are written using "deprecated or optionally-installed technologies", but you can still release the apps yourself.

The only gray area right now, as I see it, is the Apple Java Extensions API. This is the API that allows Java applications work closely with OS X, and includes things like event handling, Menu generation and underlying functionality and that make applications like IntelliJ IDEA look more like a native Mac application. As before, I sincerely hope that Apple contributes this back to OpenJDK. Worst case scenario, the Java community would have to reproduce these libraries from scratch. But besides that, Java on the Mac is just business as usual, and that's good news.

Fixing Terminal.app problems on my Mac

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:05:14 GMT

This morning, when I sat down at my computer, I saw that SuperDuper! had a problem doing its daily backup. I tried to quit the application to no avail, and then I used 'Force Quit' on it, which made an error message pop up, with no way of making it go away. After another issue with Firefox hanging after trying to save a pdf, I decided the best course of action was to reboot the machine. However, after several attempts I realized Finder was not responding, so my ultimate solution was to hold the power key down until the machine shutted down.

After a lengthy startup (which had me worried), everything seemed fine, except that when I tried to open a shell via Terminal.app, I would see it go through the login process only to have [Process Terminated] in the window, instead of the usual shell prompt. I tried deleting the preferences for Terminal, yet the same result appeared.

I had recently modified my .bashrc file, so I thought that this might have something to do with my problem, but after editing the file with MacVim I still had the same problem. I tried to open Console.app to see if there was an error being sent to the logs, but Console just crashed right after starting it up. Uh oh... Time to hit Google!

After several search terms, I came out with this forum post, which seemed to describe precisely what was going on with my computer. So, I decided to follow the instructions in the post:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
cd /var/log 
sudo mkdir asl.broken 
sudo mv asl/* asl.broken/ 
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd

And voila! Everything started working again. It seems that the last hard reset corrupted the Apple System Log (ASL) databases, and that created a whole set of problems for Terminal, Console, etc.