A few days back, Apple announced that they are deprecating Java on the Mac OS X operating system.The Mac App Store review guidelines, Section 2.24 mentions,

apps that use deprecated or optionally installed technologies will be rejected.

This essentially translates that no Java application would hit the Mac App Store. Is this it? I don’t think so. As per various posts flooding over blogs/twitter, there seems to be a little discomfort in the community about the announcement. Steve Jobs quoted in favor of this decision as,

Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms. They have their own release schedules, which are almost always different than ours, so the Java we ship is always a version behind. This may not be the best way to do it.

As James Gosling mentions in his blog post that it is not Sun providing Java for all other platforms. The platform developers are the ones doing so. This argument does not make much difference in this context. As users are still free to install any JVM that supports for Mac OS X, the world of Java would still be available on Mac. This would make sure that Java developers can continue to develop their applications independent of the platform, and others can continue to use them. The only setback to the developers is that their application can not be posted to Mac Store.

In the last paragraph of his post, Gosling also mentions how Oracle forced Apple to implement aliased rendering in Mac, which as per Mac standards was awful to implement. With Oracle coming in conflict with many other Java enthusiasts such as, Apache and Google, it could be well timed for Apple to pay back to Oracle in its own way.

Is it only Java at which Apple would stop, or will Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc.. be the next ones in line of fire. Do note that Google is also enthusiastic about Python. And none, of these have their schedules parallel to Apple schedules.

It would be interesting to see how the Java world shapes up, considering other recent developments such as,

  • Oracle suing Google over patent infringement – read more with this search

  • Schedule and release change in Java 7 – read details on Mark Reinhold’s blog post (Mark is Chief Architect of Java Platform Group at Oracle)

  • Too much noise in the recent JCP elections – read Stephen Colebourne’s blog post


Hoping to see that silver lining to this dark cloud.