Everyone calm down about Java 1.6 on Leopard. Calm down and get busy like Landon Fuller did this weekend. He blogged about it here FreeBSD’s 1.6 JDK on Mac OS X. And then he posted to the OpenJDK discussion list ten minutes ago. Clearly, it isn’t a satisfying answer, he reports “partial success” with some serious issues (stack alignment). If more people took initiative and didn’t sit around, blogging about whether Steve Jobs likes or dislikes Java we would probably already have something workable.
There has been a lot of discussion of creating a porting project on the OpenJDK mailing lists lately, if this is something you think is important, you can keep track of the discussions on the OpenJDK General Discussion List and there is an ongoing discussion about porting OpenJDK to other platforms
this is (sadly) not the only project where people prefer bitching and moaning over just coding to solve the issue. Seems latter is easier these days :(
I'm actually quite happy that the first post on this hot topic to the OpenJDK lists comes with partially working code, rather than a full scale rant. ;) That's the kind of developer community I'd love to see come to OpenJDK to grow it further, and I think that's what we're going to get with Red Hat, IcedTea and the hopefully the BSD teams on board.
I've also noticed that the Leopard /Library/Internet Plug-ins/JavaPluginCocoa.bundle has version string "12.0.0 (for JSE 6.0) ..." so maybe we'll see a 1.6 JDK on Mac OS X soon....
Of course, given the constant silence from Cupertino, it'd sure be nice to get OpenJDK ported as a back up....
If I were able to compile the sucker for Mac and work on the internals of the JDK, I would try to do what he did. But I am a Java Developer not someone who wants to have to build everything from scratch. And I shouldn't HAVE to.
But I'll just continue to develop in Java 6.0 on my Linux box while waiting for Apple to catch up. That doesn't make me like Apple less, it just makes me wonder if they are becoming a little too much like Microsoft.