Frank Cohen's Blog

Java developers have been waiting on a stable release of the Java Runtime Environment 6 for more than a year. Apple shipped Mac OS X 10.5 (codename Leopard) last Friday. The new operating system includes the Sun-developed DTrace debugger and an upgraded JRE 1.5. Apple has given no announcement, roadmap, or guidance on when Java developers will be running JRE 6 on Mac OS X 10.5.

The move to ship Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) without Java 6 is a significant sign of Sun blowing its opportunity with Java development. I wrote about this at the Apple iPhone introduction. For all of Jonathan Schwartz's talk about the opportunity for Java on mobile devices, there is no Java on iPhone. iPhone is a gated community and Java is on the outside.

That leaves Java developers in a bad position. Java developers love the clean Unix-based Mac OS X environment for development. But we have been suffering with an unstable developer-only dont-run-this-in-production release of Java 6 for the past year. Mac OS X is now the getto for Java 6.

I love Apple and Java. I wish Sun would do more to get Java on iPhone and Java 6 on Mac OS X.

Details on Leopard and DTrace are found at http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview

The Mac OS X developer center for Java is found at http://developer.apple.com/java/.

-Frank