One of the major reasons why we went with Clojure for a commercial project was the maturity of the JVM platform, particularly the HotSpot VM. We really care about multiprocessing, pauseless GC (ConcMarkSweep does a good job here), low memory situations, JIT optimizing our code and overall stability. HotSpot has been great so far.
I do not want to spend time on debugging VM or dealing with its issues. I've had that with Common Lisp and I don't want to go back there.
I think stuff like this isn't really that bad for devs who use the platform. Devs (should) have the ability to pull down the replacement in this situation when the time comes. It's going to be harder on the end user that no longer gets why his/her Java application no longer works right.
What end-user Java applications are there for OS X? The only one which comes to mind is Crashplan but I'm sure it's lurking around in other places.
Folks have mentioned Eclipse as an IDE, but there's also Eclipse as a platform. I have three Eclipse RCP apps I use for visualization daily.
I also manage a lot of equipment that requires java webstart to load a configuration GUI to accomplish tasks that would be darn near impossible at a CLI or any other way.
I logged into Cisco TAC the other day. Requires Java for ticket management tasks.
I use some rf propagation tools for a hobby that are java apps.
I make frequent use of Deskzilla. Java app.
I could go for days. I won't.
Do IDEs count? A lot of Mac users use Eclipse. It's not common among all-Mac teams that just do XCode, but it's fairly common for devs in groups that mostly do PC development to own Macbooks that they run Eclipse on.
Probably not a big concern for Apple, but it's common in universities, too, since Eclipse is (until now, at least) cross-platform enough that you can assume Windows/Mac/Linux-using students can all install it on their laptops.
As an Android developer using Eclipse on a mac, this news majorly sucks. I hope the offering from Oracle will be better than Apple's JVM though.
Encyclopedia Britannica.
Vuze aka Azureus
Re:Apple deprecates Java
by alastairpat on Thursday October 21, 2010 @07:50PM
(#1817967)
I won't be upset to see that go. Worst bit torrent programme I think I've ever used since the rebranding.
I don't see it having a big impact on server side JVM languages. As long as the developers are the only ones that have to be the ones to deal with the JVM installation headaches, it won't be that much worse than server side Java already is :)
The situation for Java will now be the same as that for developing in any programming language that Apple doesn't ship with OS X or that ships with a version lower than the one you are targeting.
My suspicion is that Apple is likely to drop Java in 10.8 which gives ~3 years for the JVM community on OS X to get their act together making OpenJDK work well with OS X.
That said, being a Clojure user this does increase my interest in seeing a Clojure-in-Clojure sooner than later. I'd like to see Clojure target LLVM the way MacRuby does.