practicing techie

Apple doesn’t exactly have a history of timely Java releases for Mac OS X so, I didn’t expect Java 7 to be available soon after its GA release, but I was very disappointed to read instead Apple’s announcement in october 2010 stating they will not be supporting Java 7 on Mac OS X. I also was quite sceptic in november, when there was a surprise announcement from Apple and Oracle saying the two companies will be working together to port OpenJDK to Mac OS X. Java 7 was published in july 2011 but patience was required from Mac OS X Java developers still.

When the OpenJDK Java 7 preview packages were finally made available in 2012 they didn’t run on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, so I had to build the JDK from the sources. That was fairly simple but rather time-consuming, and the build process practically rendered my laptop unusable since it used up a lot of CPU, IO and memory resources. Operating system reinstallation is always a huge load of work, with all the backing up, finding a suitable time slot and other arrangements, so it was only last week when I finally managed to find the time for OS X Lion upgrade, but now I’m able to use the Oracle provided JDK 7 installation packages, which makes JDK upgrades a lot easier. So, a year after Java 7 release I’m finally able to run it on my laptop! And one nice thing about Oracle picking up Java on Mac OS X is that they’ve promised to release Java 7 updates simultaneously for Mac, Windows, Linux and Solaris (Henrik on Java). I hope the Mac OS X port code base is well integrated with the rest of the tree and that also future Java major releases like 8 ja 9 will happen in a timely fashion.