Things that I am thinking about or learning (either through reading or by school of hard knocks). These are my personal thoughts and not necessarily the positions or thoughts of any organization I am associated with.

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In Apple Trying to Ditch Java from Mac OS X, But Why? by Cory Bohon on Mac|Life the author reviews Apple’s recent announcement and his take on the situation. Worth reading and thinking about.

List me as disappointed in this Apple decision. I understand that Java is now considered one of those technologies that are the source of security risks on platforms. This is chiefly because the update approach is such that platforms do not stay current. It would seem that eliminating Java from the browser makes sense, eliminating it from servers does not, and eliminating it from the desktop is the topic under discussion by security folks. I understand Apple has to invest resources to keep the tool current and it must be prioritized against other needs.

Apple adds significant platform value to Java in making Java work better with Cocoa (and both 32 bit and 64 bit). Many developers feel that the Mac is a good development platform for that reason. The ability to have software that with low effort can exist on multiple platforms is valuable and a lot of progress has been made on this. Tools like OpenProj, XMind, NetBeans, Eclipse, MoneyDance and OpenOffice are great examples of the merits of this approach. Additionally, there are other Mac applications that are Java-based or partially java-based including OmniPlan (the MPX conversion), OpenProj, XMind, parts of Acorn, CocoaMySQL, Locomotive (old Rails Tool), MatLab, NoteTaker, Plot, Screenium, SEEdit Maxi II, and Service Scrubber.

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