No, I’m not trying to turn this into the Apple blog but I found this news discouraging. Apple is deprecating their Java Virtual Machine meaning it could be removed in a future OS release. Although I’m not sure why Apple is doing this I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with Oracle.
Since Oracle purchased Sun the Java community has been rather… leery. Oracle is already suing Google because they believe Google’s use of the Java language infringes on Oracle’s Java property. Combine that with the fact Oracle isn’t the most loved company on Earth and you realize the future of Java is on somewhat shaky grounds.
I’ll admit that I use very little Java software. With that said there is one piece of Java software that I simply can’t work without, Eclipse. Eclipse is kind of the juggernaut of Integrated Development Environments (IDE). If you want to write an application in a specific language there is a very high chance that an Eclipse plug-in exists for it. It’s kind of my Swiss Army Knife for development and frankly I don’t want to be stuck running it in a virtual machine all the time (since Eclipse is as a big of a resource hog as it is useful). Granted I could just use a text editor and compilation tools but I really don’t want to switch up my entire work flow. Hopefully Java stays part of OS X for a while longer, at least until somebody else releases a quality virtual machine for it.