Heck, when the Macbook was released, I was in San Francisco attending JavaOne! Went to the Apple store when it opened and drooled over it (I was carrying a Macbook Pro then) as an affordable alternative to my MBP.

During the course of several years, I managed to convince a lot of my peers to switch - most of them Computer Science educators. I also managed to get my developer-peers to switch - banking on Apple’s support to open development platforms such as Java, PHP, RoR, in addition to their Objective-C environment.

Since last year, I have seen Apple’s support for Java wane. The last update to Java 6 is a testament to this.

How can Apple afford to release their version of Java a year or so late? C’mon! Do they really intend to have people run Ubuntu or Solaris as a guest OS using VMWare Fusion or Parallels, just so they can have access to the full development platform suite? C’mon!

Look at Java 6 - only runs 64-bit! Whilst it is true that Apple is often leading the industry in shifting from old to new technologies (see the floppy and soon, the optical drives), but in this case, they should have provided the entire package instead of a piece-meal effort.

Java 6 cannot be made your default VM - why? Because Apple does not want it to be. If they intended to shift users to the better and faster Java 6, they could have made everything run on Java 6. Pity that you cannot run Safari 3.1.1 with Java 6!

For developers, the only option is to run Ubuntu or Solaris as a guest OS. Whilst this definitely does not suck but why the need to run an entirely separate OS if you should be able to use Mac OS X - besides Java is cross-platform anyway.

Personally, I do not know what to do at the moment. I love how the Mac simply just works (try configuring your WiFi as an example) but Apple’s current direction, that of having only one environment to support, i.e., Objective-C, is a big turn off for me. Even Dr. James Gosling, who was a Mac user, dumped his Macbook Pro because of Apple’s non-support for developers.

June is Apple’s WorldWide Developers’ Conference (WWDC), a conference that is miniscule compared to this month’s JavaOne (Moscone North and South compared to WWDC’s Moscone West!), and we will see how serious Apple is in supporting Java and other development environment.

Times like this, I wish that Sun will take over the JDK/JVM on the Mac or better yet, let the OpenJDK community do its job. UNFORTUNATELY, the graphical interface between Macs and Java is something that needs a lot of Apple support because the Mac OS X is so closed and proprietary compared to Solaris and Linux.

So, if you are a developer using a Mac, how has Apple treated you recently?