Java and Apple: Fallen from love

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As several people have written before, there is no Java 1.6 in the new Mac OS. What a stupid move. At most developer conferences concerning Java people have been and are using Apple laptops. Now in the last release, Leopard, Apple doesn’t even mention Java any more. But the page shouts “Work in a developer’s dreamland.” They said this some years ago about Java. Now it’s Ruby on Rails. Apple not even once mentions Java on their feature page, but “Leopard is the perfect platform for Ruby on Rails development, with Rails, Mongrel, and Capistrano built in.” Don’t they know the Rails hype is over? Really. It is. That the enterprise will move to Grails, if they have need for a dynamic lanugage? And move to Scala, when they want to innovate? And that today most big RoR applications are into legacy land. Funny that three companies with Ruby on Rails recently offered me CTO jobs – I guess you have to bring in some maintenance talent. Companies have to deal with new problems after some years of RoR. That’s another story. Back to Java. There are so many more companies buying Apple laptops for Java development than for Rails development. And as Alex said:

“But my boss has said that if Macs don’t support Java 6, moving forward it’s just not going to be an option anymore. We need to run and test with Java 6 and not having access to it is a big issue.”

There is so much more interest in Java than in Rails. But I guess we should have seen this coming with a Steve Jobs quote like: ““Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.”.

Our love was nice. I fear it’s over. “Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness.” Together with my current burned and smoking MacBook Pro power adapter, which they didn’t want to take back, my love for Apple decreased a lot (don’t mention the broken batteries in several iBooks and MacBooks). Rant over.

Thanks for listening.

Update: Yes, I know about the inaccurancies of Google trends, especially when you do not hit the right search terms. So one needed to include RoR, or perhaps even Ruby. In this case though, looking at the long, declining, but flat line of Java I think the search term “Java” more reflects the language than the island, there are no big spikes which should be there when it would reflect that people search that much for the island. Of course, this is debatable. But most often people confuse the “news” section of Google trends and the “search terms” section of Google trends. The one has nothing to do with the other. When you actually do a “Java” Google search, there is no hit for Java as an island on the first several pages.

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