Apple seems to have given up with supporting Java on the desktop. They have really been pulling back hard on any desktop Java related technology.

It’s only on the desktop. Apple’s J2EE based WebObjects technology doesn’t look like its going anywhere for now (Apple’s store and .Mac server are still powered by it) but that is a server side technology that was created back in Job’s NeXT days which is included in Mac OS X Server.

Apple slipped and didn’t ship Java 6 with Leopard like they implied they would. They also pulled the developer previews of Java 6 from the Apple developer site. What is left for Java 5 support in Leopard is sadly broken around everything AWT and Swing related. Not that I’m horribly sad to see it going but years ago, Apple was excited about supporting Java. I remember claims that Mac OS X would become the platform for Java on the Desktop a few years ago at an Apple Developer Conference.

About a year and a half ago, Apple still supported Java bindings to Cocoa and Java was treated as a first class citizen in Xcode for developing Cocoa apps. That was depreciated, and Apple’s solution was to tell people to migrate to Swing instead and publish articles on the ADC on how to embed the JRE and use JNI with Cocoa and Objective-C code. Long ago, Apple had bindings for Quicktime that fell into depreciation in Jaguar. They also had bindings for other libraries but they are long since gone. Before Leopard, there was almost as many references to Java on the Xcode and OSX pages as there was to Objective-C. Now you can’t find anything. Old links all redirect to developer.apple.com/java.

You also don’t see Java on the iPhone, which isn’t a huge surprise. Jobs was quoted as saying right before the iPhone’s release, “Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.”

There has been a lot of talk about porting OpenJDK to the Mac, but I don’t really believe its worth the effort to take on that beast. Why not instead take the opportunity to embrace something already supported on Mac like Mono (or maybe Python) ? :-)