Java and Apple: Fallen from love
Published October 27th, 2007 in Apple, Java, Rails, RubyAs several people have written before, there is no Java 1.6 in the new Mac OS. What a stupid move. At most developer conferences concerning Java people have been and are using Apple laptops. Now in the last release, Leopard, Apple doesn’t even mention Java any more. But the page shouts “Work in a developer’s dreamland.” They said this some years ago about Java. Now it’s Ruby on Rails. Apple not even once mentions Java on their feature page, but “Leopard is the perfect platform for Ruby on Rails development, with Rails, Mongrel, and Capistrano built in.” Don’t they know the Rails hype is over? Really. It is. That the enterprise will move to Grails, if they have need for a dynamic lanugage? And move to Scala, when they want to innovate? And that today most big RoR applications are into legacy land. Funny that three companies with Ruby on Rails recently offered me CTO jobs - I guess you have to bring in some maintenance talent. Companies have to deal with new problems after some years of RoR. That’s another story. Back to Java. There are so many more companies buying Apple laptops for Java development than for Rails development. And as Alex said:
“But my boss has said that if Macs don’t support Java 6, moving forward it’s just not going to be an option anymore. We need to run and test with Java 6 and not having access to it is a big issue.”
There is so much more interest in Java than in Rails. But I guess we should have seen this coming with a Steve Jobs quote like: ““Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.”.
Our love was nice. I fear it’s over. “Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness.” Together with my current burned and smoking MacBook Pro power adapter, which they didn’t want to take back, my love for Apple decreased a lot (don’t mention the broken batteries in several iBooks and MacBooks). Rant over.
Thanks for listening.
Update: Yes, I know about the inaccurancies of Google trends, especially when you do not hit the right search terms. So one needed to include RoR, or perhaps even Ruby. In this case though, looking at the long, declining, but flat line of Java I think the search term “Java” more reflects the language than the island, there are no big spikes which should be there when it would reflect that people search that much for the island. Of course, this is debatable. But most often people confuse the “news” section of Google trends and the “search terms” section of Google trends. The one has nothing to do with the other. When you actually do a “Java” Google search, there is no hit for Java as an island on the first several pages.
Well… let’s port OpenJDK to Mac OS X, and forget about Apple’s Java support.
Your Google Trend is inaccurate as it includes lots of news about Java island re earthquakes and Tsunami in Indonesia.
Yes, there have been many many earthquakes and volcano activities on the island, and the islands around it.
And an very interesting thing I’ve notice recently which is when people mention intend switching to Ubuntu for Java 6, that message will somehow disappear in a very short time. It happened in several discussing forum.
I might be switching to Ubuntu - not because Java 6 which is a very small step forward - but for Java 7 with closure support. I fear Apple will never support Java 7. So I have no immediate need for anything beyounf Java 5 - most companies will use it for some years. But I want to play with Java 7 when it arrives.
Perhaps running Idea and Java in a VMWare Linux image could be a solution :-)
@Emmanuel: Yes, hopefully OpenJDK will make it to MacOS.
@Mark: Yes, I know, I wrote several times about Google trends and have mentioned the inaccurancies, especially when you do not hit the right search terms. So one needed to include RoR, or perhaps even Ruby. In this case though, looking at the long, declining, but flat line of Java I think the search term “Java” more reflects the language than the island, there are no big spikes which should be there when it would reflect that people search that much for the island. Of course, this is debatable.But most often people confuse the “news” section of Google trends and the “search terms” section of Google trends. The one has nothing to do with the other.
When you actually do a “Java” Google search, there is no hit for Java as an island on the first several pages.
But if you search “Java” on Google News Search http://news.google.com/news?q=java
Then you get Java the island.
If only Google can tell the trend of Java vs C when Java just came out. Oh wait, Internet was different back then.
@Mark: Yes you’re right, but I’m not interested in the Goolge News Search results, but in what people enter into into the Google search box. About the Java vs. C, just compare Ruby on Rails trends with a Blog versus Wiki trend search. See the difference between the RoR and the Wiki graph? Or between Wiki and Ruby?