On 9/23/13 1:22 AM, James Wettenhall wrote: > However, I don't think that announcement put all Mac OS X Java > developers' minds at ease. When the February 2013 end-of-public-updates > milestone for Java 6 (as provided by Apple's JRE) approached, many > developers on the Apple Java mailing list were posting to threads with > titles like "Do we have to fear February?" > http://lists.apple.com/archives/java-dev/2012/Oct/msg00115.html because > they didn't feel that the Oracle build of the JRE was ready to deploy > their apps on - even 2 years after the Oracle/Apple announcement, many > developers felt that there were still critical Mac OS X bugs in Oracle's > JRE build.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9237330/Oracle_pulls_Java_6_plug_but_Apple_likely_to_keep_patching_OS_X_Snow_Leopard seems to clarify the situation a bit. The latest Java available from Apple is only a couple of months old-- Java for OS X 2013-04 or Java for OS X 10.6 Update 16 both contain 1.6.0_51, with a release date in late June. So Apple is still updating their version of Java, apparently using the non-public updates as they did with Java 5 on Leopard. Snow Leopard users may get left out in the cold at some point with respect to updates, but for now, it looks like Java for OS X is not dead yet. > OK, it sounds like the last time I investigated deploying a Java > application on a modern Mac OS X system, I jumped to the conclusion that > the reason why my JarBundler-bundled Java application couldn't find the > Oracle Java Runtime Environment was that the JarBundler / > JavaApplicationStub method was only designed to allow an app to find the > Apple JRE. But it sounds like the reason was actually that I had only > installed the Oracle Java 7 browser plugin, not the full Java Runtime > Environment. It seems that your assertion was correct. I installed a fresh copy of Mountain Lion in a VM to test what would happen if a user tries to run the TurboVNC Viewer without Java installed. It pops up a message saying: "To open 'TurboVNC Viewer', you need a Java SE 6 runtime. Would you like to install one now?" If you click "Install", then it happily fetches Java for OS X 2013-04 and installs it, then TurboVNC Viewer launches. Before I did that, though, I tried to see if installing Oracle Java SE 7 would satisfy the JavaApplicationStub, and the answer is apparently "no". I first installed the Java SE 7 JRE, which is in fact just a browser plugin. You can, however, get command-line functionality from Oracle Java by installing the JDK. OS X is very friendly about this. When I tried to execute /usr/bin/java before installing the JDK, a dialog popped up directing me to the Oracle web site and instructing me to install the JDK in order to use /usr/bin/java. Not sure whether that dialog was a product of having installed the Oracle JRE previously, or whether it was something that Apple provided. It does seem that AppBundler is a better long-term solution, though, since it can use the Java SE 7 JRE (plugin) if it is installed. Thus, as long as users are able to successfully launch Java applications in their browser, then they should be able to successfully launch TurboVNC locally. Since the user would have to install a Java plugin to get JWS functionality anyhow, this seems like the most prudent approach, rather than trying to bundle Java in our app. Apart from the licensing and disk footprint issues, bundling is messy for other reasons-- I would have to be responsible for releasing a new version of TurboVNC every time someone discovers a security loophole in Java. No thanks. I've added a Feature Request for migrating from JavaApplicationStub to AppBundler. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60133471&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ VirtualGL-Devel mailing list VirtualGL-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/virtualgl-devel
