From the announcement: “The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has secured a license from Sun Microsystems to distribute a native FreeBSD version of both the Java Development Kit (JDK) and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Thanks to the great efforts of the FreeBSD Java team, these should be available for inclusion with the upcoming release of FreeBSD 4.5 in January, 2002. The general availability of a distributable version of Java will benefit end users, commercial users, and developers who use FreeBSD. Java continues to grow in popularity and has become heavily used in server side web applications, one of FreeBSD’s core areas of strength. With an officially licensed binary Java distribution, FreeBSD becomes an ideal platform for execution, development, and deployment of Java based solutions.”
FreeBSD Gets a Java Injection from Sun
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What does this mean for MacOS X, which is largely based on FreeBSD? MacOS X already has great Java-potential. Is this an extra boost, or is it of no use for MacOS X?
Hehe,
now I can replace all Linux servers here, that’s nice….
Nothing against Linux, but I started to like FreeBSD much more than Linux the first time I used it.
BeHappy:)
LoCal
OS X already comes with Java. Apple provides a CD of Development tools (one can also download these), which already have a spectacular development environment for C++, Objective-C, and Java. I believe it’s just NeXTStep for OS X, although I never actually used NeXTStep so maybe I’m wrong.
OTOH I believe the Project Builder generates non-portable Java. I haven’t written any Java code using OS X so I can’t say more.
But… what does it mean for OS X? IIRC most Java development tools from Sun are written in Java (eg Forte). In theory then they would already run on OS X (haven’t tried them personally) so the FreeBSD development shouldn’t mean much at all for OS X.
Remco, MacOSX has already Java. And please do not mix FreeBSD with MacOSX, as MacOSX is based on the original BSD-4.4, as FreeBSD is, but not on FreeBSD directly (FreeBSD has evolved for 10 years since the BSD-4.4, and MacOSX has already evolved in its own way, but not necessarily on the same direction as FreeBSD). What I am trying to say is that MacOSX is not based on FreeBSD, but on BSD-4.4.
The Mac OS X userland code is based on FreeBSD. This is from the steady press releases from Apple as they were hyping up OS X. In fac, on the http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/darwin.html“>Darwin , there’s a link to the FreeBSD site under the heading: “Find out about the UNIX bits in Mac OS X”
I’m not a very technical person, although I try to understand a little bit how MacOS X is constructed. There’s a lot of stuff to read about FreeBSD, but not much about BSD4.4. Also I can’t seem to find much (understandable) stuff on Mach 3.0. Why did Apple choose for BSD4.4 and not (for instance) FreeBSD and Mach 3.0? Is it something they had to do, because of the NeXT-heritage? And is it a good choice (I know that is complex and discussable to explain precisely)? I’ve always been very interested in BeOS (never used it though), which seemed to be a great promise. As a music-producer BeOS as a multimediaOS was very interesting. I’m very happy with the wonderful Audio (/midi)Core in MacOS X. Anyway, I hope some people can shed some light on my questions.
Sorry to bother you again, but I don’t understand the difference between FreeBSD and BSD4.4. Isn’t BSD the collective name for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD? So, what is 4.4BSD then?
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/unix/“>Read to understand how all the Unixes were derived from the original one. The BSD4.4 is the mother BSD that gave birth to the rest of the BSDs…
A few points on the above statement and comments:
1. This agreement doesn’t necessarily mean great things for Java on FreeBSD. This sounds very much like a similar announcement made by Be back in 1999 about Sun helping to bring the Java2 platform to BeOS. This never materialized. It *can* mean very good things however, if Sun is helping with the port. It has a higher probabilty of working with FreeBSD because there are more FreeBSD developers and FreeBSD Unix has a lot more similarities with Linux and Solaris than BeOS did.
2. The JDK shipping with the latest MacOS X developer tools is JDK 1.3.1. This is the latest non-beta JDK available from Sun, which only ships for Solaris, Windows and Linux directly. Because Apple is pushing for OS X to be a major web platform, development or server oriented, they will probably keep lockstep with Sun for the JDK 1.4 release. There will therefore be little need for anyone to use the FreeBSD baseline instead, except for a potential bug squashing benefit.
3. There seem to be some misconception of Java on the Macintosh. Using Project Builder, Forte, JBuilder on your favorite editor and command line tools, a developer can make 100% Pure Java code. AWT, Swing et cetera are fully supported under OS X. What Jack may have been thinking of is the Cocoa Java bridge. Cocoa was originally only in Objective-C, but Apple wrote Java classes which allowed all the Cocoa capabilities to be accessible from the Java language as well. This code can be generated by Interface Builder (which does nothing but build Macintosh GUI’s). Any of this code will work solely within MacOS X, since it operates with Apple-specific external Java libraries, which don’t exist outside of the Macintosh world.
The biggest problem with Java on Mac OS X is speed. It appears that a lot of GUI functionality is significantly slower under OS X than on Windows. I’m trying to get some hard benchmark information to study this, but I’m only about 25% of the way through.