Instead of refactoring yours code you should really consider moving to Ubuntu. I’m in the middle of the process and my Mac will no longer be my developing platform.

Kenneth… a Java 6 refactoring involves a global search and replace to remove the annotation @Override and then a run through of Eclipse’s “automatically add missing @Override annotations” to add them back where they are valid. (Wish I’d realised this earlier in the process though). It certainly isn’t more work than changing my entire working environment!

That said… this is the closest I’ve come yet to downloading the Ubuntu installer… if Java 6 doesn’t come out fairly soon, Apple will really be trying my patience.

Hope you are lucky. I’ve been waiting sometime and till now not even a plan, roadmap, nothing ! That’s enough and I’m going to kill the pain one’s forever.

Wish u luck

I’m in the same boat as you guys. I was considering buying a new macbook pro with leopard, but will hold off until java support is better

CIO.com has an article about this already… Leopard and Java: What’s Up with That?

Um…why not reinstall 6?

Robert, the Java 6 beta installer refuses to proceed on Leopard.

Interestingly, Apple had time to introduce a boat load of support for Ruby and Python.

I made the mistake as many others probably to install Leopard. Now after few unpleasant surprises I have to rollback back to Tiger until Java 6 is fully supported by Leopard. The last time I felt so bad was when I installed Vista.

That’s just one more nail in the coffin for that platform from my point of view. I have lots of colleagues who are sooo excited about the mac. I can see it looks cool, and it would be so nice for it to be this unix-tool-powerfull platform developer for the developer while having a more plug-n-play like interface than what linux can produce.

Hmm, but there are all those drawbacks, if you are a Java developer.

First, it was java5, that took ages to come to the osx, when compared to other platforms.

Then, there are the straange keybindings, having to dig a lot around to find stuff like backslash and the { } signs which, lets face it, are used quite a lot in Java

And now the story seems to repeat itself with Java6.

Come on. Apple seems to dislike Java, so leave the platform if you are developing a lot in Java. Apple seems to dig ruby a lot. Then go buy textmate and run osx if you use that a lot.

Oh, and then there are the whole cost issue. I believe the same hardware can be obtained for lower prices in a standard pc laptop. There is actual competition on the pc front. The prizes on apple hardware is SO controlled. Everythings costs exactly the same everywhere. Hmmm.

Just my 5 cents.

The whole article is rather pragmatic. I’m really mad about it! Read http://javablasphemy.blogspot.com

[…] Leopard doesn’t have Java 6 […]

First of all… thank you, thank you, thank you for this post! My dev environment is still totally hosed since it’s configured for Java6.. but hopefully that will be fixed soon.

Secondly, how do you ‘roll back’ to 10.4 Tiger?

Lastly, I agree with everyone here.. it’s tough being a java developer on mac. I’m going to reinstall xp on the windows partition and set it up as dev environment cause things don’t look too good in the near term on mac. Damn, there were so many rumors about mac getting a really nice 64 bit version of java 6.. so hopefully that’s still in the works. Good luck everyone!

@Kenneth: I’ve tried Ubuntu before, using it for over a year at my previous position, and this situation is way too minor for me to consider going back to it, let alone buy new hardware. The OSX experience has been far more pleasant, and I see no evidence that this issue with Java 6 isn’t temporary.

@Tech Per: “I believe the same hardware can be obtained for lower prices in a standard pc laptop.” Not so much. I heard the same claim on various blogs, like Mark Pilgrim’s. When I go to PC laptop websites (such as Dell, Lenovo, etc) and start comparing hardware with similar features, there’s no significant price different. Hell, sometimes the Mac is a smidge cheaper.

And to be fair to Mark, his impression of PC laptop pricing was coloured by the fact that he was able to buy one at a deep discount from his employer.

Hm, anyone having problems with Eclipse on Leopard?

I’ve installed Leo on iMac and MBP and on both systems my Eclipse became quite unstable. On Tiger, it was very stable.

It has crashed at least ten times already (JVM crash with Report a problem to Apple dialog), while on Tiger it crashed like only once within 3 months.

Most often I can crash it by opening many different files, mainly internal Java classes (with apple+shift+t) like LinkedBlockingQueue and then ConcurrentLinkedQueue and then adding some others. Suddenly when trying to open yet another file it crashes, but I can’t always reproduce it. It says either bus error or some other kernel exception problem. Oh, it also crashed just a moment ago when closing Eclipse (after pressing apple+q).

On iMac I made a clean install of Leo (archive and install) while on MBP I made standard upgrade install from Tiger. I’ve tried eclipse 3.3 and nightly build (3.4).

I’ve send several crash reports to Apple already, but somehow I fill that they won’t even look at those before next year

I too am VERY disappointed with this. I am an enterprise java developer working who tried apple with the first mini then became a switcher with the intel MBP. I think Apple should realize that although we are a small segment of their market we generally have a great deal of clout in the organizations where we work. My peers and I generally work as ‘architects’ or IT/SD/Dev managers, where our recomendations on hardware are acted on because it’s a minor cost compared to the dev team itself. I would love to be able to try using xserves and mandate a deployment of MBP’s to the dev team, but this lack of java updates has completely blown this out of the water. It may seem as though JSE1.6 isn’t used in production, but in fact our projects generally take 12-18 months so work starts with a version of Java well before people will see it in the wild. Apple needs to at LEAST make a statement on their Java plans with a roadmap NOW!

Java 6 installed on Tiger doesn’t work on Leopard because it isn’t 64 bit yet

Everyone needs to CALM DOWN over this! A little perspective please… did you know that with EVERY SINGLE MAC OS X RELEASE Apple has released a major Java update within a couple of weeks of the release?

See for yourself:

http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2007/10/28/os-x-java-definitive-timeline/

If you are a full time Mac based Java Developer, I suggest getting a Apple Select Developer Membership ($499), get your 20% discount on hardware for a nice new MacBook Pro:

http://developer.apple.com/membership/hardware.html

save minimum $400 on hardware, get free seed versions of OS X (save $129) and look under the ‘Java’ section of the Developer Connection.

If you are in the UK then claim back the cost of the MacBook Pro to boot:

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/helpsheets/ir206.pdf

If you are not, you can wait a few weeks whilst the rest of us feedback on bugs to Apple to make sure everything is cosy.

[…] pueden ver numerosas protestas de usuarios que se sienten traicionados. Desde luego es una buena táctica para perder mercado, y alejarse […]

Can’t thank you enough for this post. I was at the point of reinstalling the OS…thanks for saving me many hours. Luckily, I have the option of using Java 5 for my app and can get on with my life.

Thank you, this works fine for me. I only had to remove in addition the Java 1.6 directories and also the A and the Current directory from

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions

Thank you for these nice instructions.

Regarding Apple: I like Apple and don’t blame them for breaking a beta DP version of something when installing a new OS version. What I don’t like is that they did not come up with instructions like yours on their support pages. Having JDK 1.6 DP installed when upgrading to 10.5 has killed all my Java-based apps - and that was not very nice. I was not able to get any Java work done on my Mac for more than a week.

[…] Javablog » Apple OS X Leopard doesn’t have Java 6 And worse yet… if you installed the Java 6 beta release in Apple OS X Tiger, then when you upgrade Java won’t work at all! Read on if this has affected you… […]