Unlike the dispute with Adobe, for normal folks using their Mac in a non-corporate computing environment, this isn't that big of a deal. 2.24 states, 'Apps that use deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, Rosetta) will be rejected.' The same goes for the forthcoming Mac App Store, according to rules for developers leaked online today. In other words: Apple is discouraging the use of Java on its computers for the future, with the strong hint that it's going to stop supporting it altogether. The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained through the standard support cycles of those products. This means that the Apple-produced runtime will not be maintained at the same level, and may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X. Apple released an updated version of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, but warned that they won't be doing that again:Īs of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the version of Java that is ported by Apple, and that ships with Mac OS X, is deprecated.
In a quiet update yesterday, Apple indicated that its support for Java on Macs isn't long for this world. Apple hints it doesn't plan to support Java in future versions of Mac OS X.
