For now, we’re pretty happy running the community-provided OpenJDK builds. Here at, we think that we could be looking at roughly a 3 month gap between Java 7 GA and a Mac release – so maybe October 2011 if all goes well.
Of course, the OpenJDK code (which Oracle regard as the reference implementation) will be available (and GPL) for anyone who wants to build their own binary. This applies to the Oracle-supplied binary builds. The official line from Oracle is that JDK 7 will GA with Windows, Linux and Solaris as first-class supported operating systems, and the Mac will release as soon as possible after, with the hope that at some point in the future updates for the Mac version will be released at the same time as other OSes. Relevant bug fixes should be able to go both ways between the two related ports, where possible.Īll of this is likely to take time, however. Buried at the bottom of the page is a link to a page where the open bugs for the Mac port are being publicly tracked (as they’re ported across from Apple’s internal system).ĭevelopment is focused around JDK 7 – the basic idea is to take a fork of the community-maintained BSD port, and add Apple’s code to it, to produce a Mac-specific port.
Over the last few days, there have been some developments – for example this wiki page, detailing the progress of the Mac port, has appeared. I, for one, can’t wait to see what Nimbus look-and-feel will look like under native Aqua. It’s also good news for Mac users – as it means that, for example, the native Aqua look-and-feel will continue to be supported – so Java desktop apps on Mac will look lovely. This is good news for Java developers who want to develop on Mac.