Kudos To Landon Fuller
With all the complaining about Apple not having shipped JDK 6 with Leopard it's nice that someone has actually stopped whining and started coding. So kudos to Landon Fuller for actually doing something useful. Of course, he hasn't really gotten anywhere because porting Java is an awful lot of work, but if nothing else he'll understand why it takes Apple so long.
It also means we can start the timer to see if the open source model can actually bring Java 6 to OS X faster than Apple can.
December 6th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
The answer to that would probably be yes then…
December 6th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
Robert,
They still require X11 and are nowhere near passing the JCK – heck they probably haven’t even got the test environment set up yet and that’s not trivial for the JCK. In other words, they have all the hard work left to do.
December 12th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
The BSD JDK passes the TCK just fine; FreeBSD has a Java Distribution License from Sun, and distributes TCK-validated binaries: http://www.freebsd.org/java/
As for X11 — it works fine for Linux, and while it may not be as nice as native graphics on the Mac, it is a complete solution.
December 12th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
The OS X port doesn’t pass the TCK yet and X11 is not a serious option for OS X Java, nor have they any support for applets which while not required by the TCK is a pretty important part of Java on OS X. In other words, it may be useful for developers but it is not a viable option for mainstream Java 6 on Mac.