This is supposed to be the week in which Apple killed Java and Flash on the Mac, but it isn’t. In fact, looking at recent history, Flash could be about to enter its healthiest period on the platform, but the story regarding Java is more complicated.
Since releasing Mac OS X back in 2001, Apple has maintained the ports of both the Flash and Java runtimes on the platform. This contrasts with the situation on Windows, where Adobe and Sun/Oracle respectively distribute and maintain the runtimes. (Those with long memory will remember the problems regarding Microsoft’s JRE, which was eventually killed by court injunction.) In both cases, Apple has received occasional chastisement when its supported version of the runtime lagged behind the upstream release.
In the case of Flash, this was always related to security issues. Apple’s version would lack a couple of patches that Adobe had made available. However, because Adobe maintains the official runtime for Mac OS X, it’s super-easy to grab the latest version and stay up to date. If Apple stops maintaining its sporadically-updated distribution of the Flash runtime, then everyone who needs it will be forced into grabbing a new version from Adobe (who are free to remind users to install updates as other third-party vendors do). Everyone who doesn’t need it doesn’t have the runtime installed, thus reducing the attack surface of their browsers. Win-win.
Java, as I mentioned, is a more complicated kettle of bananas. Apple isn’t redistributing the upstream JRE in this case, they’re building their own from upstream sources. While other runtimes exist, none integrates as well with the OS due to effort Apple put in early on to support Yellow Box for Java and Aqua Swing. This means that you can’t just go somewhere else to get your fix of JRE – it won’t work the same.
There isn’t a big market of Java apps on the Mac platform, so there isn’t a big vendor who might pick up the slack and provide an integrated JRE. Oracle support OpenOffice on the platform, but that isn’t a big earner. There’s IBM with their Lotus products – I’ll come onto that shortly. That just leaves the few Java client apps that do matter on the Mac – IDEs. As a number of Java developers have stated loudly this week, there are many Java developers currently using Macs. These people could either switch to a different OS, or look to maintain support for their IDEs on the Mac: which means supporting the JRE and the GUI libraries used by those IDEs.
By far the people in the best position to achieve that are on Eclipse. The Eclipse IDE (and the applications built on its Rich Client Platform, including IBM’s stuff mentioned earlier) use a GUI library called SWT. This uses native code to draw its widgets using real Cocoa (in recent versions anyway – there’s a Carbon port too) so SWT already works with native drawing in whatever JRE people bring along. This SoyLatte port of OpenJDK can already run Eclipse Helios. Eclipse works with Apache Harmony too, though the releases lag behind quite a bit.
So the conclusion is that your runtime isn’t dead, in fact its support is equivalent to that found on the Windows platform. However, if you’re using Java you might experience a brief period in the wilderness unless/until the community support effort catches up with its own requirements – which aren’t the same as Apple’s.
