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J. Gosling's point isn't entirely clear to me, either. I came away with the impression that Oracle is a difficult company to deal with. Perhaps he's trying to d

J. Gosling's point isn't entirely clear to me, either. I came away with the impression that Oracle is a difficult company to deal with. Perhaps he's trying to draw a line between Oracle being difficult and Apple deciding they no longer want to do their own port. I supposes that's possible. Still, it seems more likely that Apple decided that the cost of maintaining the Java port on OS X simply wasn't worth it. In the same manner that they decided that nobody wanted to use Flash on their smart-phones, they've decided that nobody wants to use Java on their laptops or workstations.

bad_user 16y ago
Cutting costs is not the same thing as banishment. On Flash they took a political stance, i.e. Flash is proprietary, HTML5 / H.264 is the future, long-live Quicktime.
gaiusparx 16y ago
My guess: 1. the port of Java to Mac OS X Lion is affecting the schedule for a summer 2011 release for Lion. 2. Mac App Store is not accepting desktop Java app.
jonhendry 16y ago
I think they've decided that, at this point, Java is within a few years of being a floppy disk drive in the iMac era. Okay, that's a little harsh. But apart from Android, Java doesn't seem to have much buzz these days. And Android gets into the whole lawsuit mess. Also, there seems to be a lot of disruption in the Java space due to the Oracle acquisition. IBM ditching Harmony for OpenJDK, the Oracle/Google lawsuit, etc. This seems like an opportune time to step away. Since the whole Java ecosystem is stirred up and reconfiguring, it makes sense for Apple to pull back before a new configuration has solidified. While things are fluid, let the Java organizations figure out what they want to do with OS X.
- babblefrog 16y ago
  Java the language may not have much buzz, but other languages running on the JVM sure do. And they will be equally effected, whatever happens.

bad_user 16y ago

Cutting costs is not the same thing as banishment. On Flash they took a political stance, i.e. Flash is proprietary, HTML5 / H.264 is the future, long-live Quicktime.

gaiusparx 16y ago

My guess: 1. the port of Java to Mac OS X Lion is affecting the schedule for a summer 2011 release for Lion. 2. Mac App Store is not accepting desktop Java app.

jonhendry 16y ago

I think they've decided that, at this point, Java is within a few years of being a floppy disk drive in the iMac era. Okay, that's a little harsh. But apart from Android, Java doesn't seem to have much buzz these days. And Android gets into the whole lawsuit mess. Also, there seems to be a lot of disruption in the Java space due to the Oracle acquisition. IBM ditching Harmony for OpenJDK, the Oracle/Google lawsuit, etc. This seems like an opportune time to step away. Since the whole Java ecosystem is stirred up and reconfiguring, it makes sense for Apple to pull back before a new configuration has solidified. While things are fluid, let the Java organizations figure out what they want to do with OS X.

babblefrog 16y ago
Java the language may not have much buzz, but other languages running on the JVM sure do. And they will be equally effected, whatever happens.