I’m late to the party blogging about Apple deprecating its Java for Mac OS X, with particularly good posts up from Matt Drance and Lachlan O’Dea. And I’ve already posted a lot of counterpoints on the Java Posse’s Google group (see here, here, and here). So let me lead with the latest: there’s now a petition calling on Apple to contribute its Mac Java sources to OpenJDK. This won’t work, for at least four reasons I can think of:

Petitions never work.

Apple doesn’t listen.

Apple is a commercial licensee of Java. The terms in their contract with Sun/Oracle almost certainly prohibit open-sourcing their Sun-derived code.

licensee of Java. The terms in their contract with Sun/Oracle almost certainly prohibit open-sourcing their Sun-derived code. Even if it could be open-sourced, Apple’s code was developed for years with the assumption it was proprietary code. The company would want nothing less than an absolutely forensic code analysis to ensure there are no loopholes, stray imports or links, or anything else that a creative FSF lawyer could use to claim that Mac OS X links against the GPL’ed OpenJDK and must therefore itself be GPL’ed. Apple has nothing to earn and everything to lose by open-sourcing its JDK, so don’t hold your breath.

It’s also frustratingly typical that many of the signatories of this petition have spent the last week blogging, tweeting, podcasting, and posting that they will never buy another Apple product (and they’re gonna go tell all their friends and relations that Apple sucks now, just for good measure). Here’s the thing: companies generally try to do right by their customers. When you assert that you will never be their customer again, you remove any reason the company would have to listen to your opinion. Really, this much should be common sense, right?

Buried in all the denunciations of “control freak Steve Jobs” and his nefarious skullduggery is a wake-up call that Oracle and the Java community need to hear: one of your biggest commercial licensees, the second biggest US corporation by market cap, doesn’t think licensing Java will help them sell computers anymore. Why does nobody take this screamingly obvious hint?

I imagine part of the reason that the activists want Apple to contribute its code instead of letting it go to waste is that they’ve realized what a tall order it would be for the community to attempt a port on its own. Java is huge, and its native dependencies are terribly intractable: even the vaunted Linux community couldn’t get Blackdown Java up to snuff, and Sun came to the rescue with an official version for Linux. How likely is it that we’ll find enough people who know Java and Mac programming well enough — and who care to contribute their time — to do all this work for free? It may well be a non-starter. Landon Fuller got the headless bits of JDK 6 ported to OS X ported in a few weeks in the form of the Soy Latte project, but had to settle for an X11-based UI, and his announcement asked for help with Core Audio sound support and OS X integration in general… and I don’t believe any help ever materialized.

Aside: when volunteers aren’t enough, the next step is to get out the checkbook and call in mercenaries. I looked at javax.sound yesterday and estimated it would take me 4-6 weeks, full-time, to do a production-quailty port using Core Audio. I’ll bid the project out at $20,000. Sign a contract and I’ll contribute the sources to any project you like (OpenJDK, Harmony, whatever). You know where to reach me. And I’m not holding my breath.

The real problem with porting Java is that Java’s desktop packages – AWT, Swing, javax.sound, etc. – are very much a white elephant, one which perfectly fits Wikipedia’s definition:

A white elephant is an idiom for a valuable possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) is out of proportion to its usefulness or worth.

As I’ve established, Java’s desktop packages are egregiously expensive. In fact, with Apple’s exit, it’s not clear that there’s anybody other than Oracle delivering a non-X11 AWT/Swing implementation for any platform: it’s just too much cost and not enough value. End-user Desktop Java applications are rare and get rarer every day, displaced largely by browser-based webapps, but also by Flash and native apps.

We know the big use for AWT and Swing, and it’s a terrible irony: measured by app launches or time spent in an app, the top AWT/Swing apps are surely NetBeans and IntelliJ, IDEs used for creating… other Java applications! The same can be said of the SWT toolkit, which powers the Eclipse IDE and not much else. This is what makes this white elephant so difficult to dispose of: all the value of modern-day Java is writing for the server, but nearly all the Java developers are using the desktop stuff to do so, making them the target market (and really the only market) for Desktop Java. If there were other viable Java applications on the desktop, used by everyday end-users, Apple couldn’t afford to risk going without Java. There aren’t, and it can.

There’s lots of blame to go around, not the least of which should be directed at Sun for abandoning desktop Java right after Swing 1.0 came out. It’s embarrassing that my five-year-old Swing book is more up-to-date with its technology than my year-old-iPhone book is, but it illustrates the fact that Apple has continued to evolve iOS, while Sun punted on client-side Java for years, and then compounded the problem by pushing aside the few remaining Swing developers in favor of the hare-brained JavaFX fiasco. Small wonder that nearly all the prominent desktop Java people I know are now at Google, working on Android.

Other languages are easier to port and maintain because Ruby, Python, and the like don’t try to port their own entire desktop API with them from platform to platform. Again, the irony is that this stuff is so expensive in Java, and little related to the server-side work where Java provides nearly all of its value. I’m not the first to say it, but Oracle would do itself a huge favor by finding a way to decouple all this stuff from the parts of Java that actually get used, likely as a result of Project Jigsaw. Imagine something like this:

In this hypothetical arrangement, the desktop packages are migrated out of Java SE, which now contains the baseline contents of Java that everybody uses: collections, I/O, language utilities, etc. These are the parts that EE actually uses, and that dependency stays in place. I’ve colored those boxes green to indicate that they don’t require native widgets to be coded. What does require that is the new Java “Desktop Edition” (“Java DE”), which is SE plus AWT, Swing, Java2D, javax.sound, etc. For the rare case where you need UI stuff on the server, like image manipulation as a web service, combine EE and DE to create “Java OE”, the “Omnibus edition”. Also hanging off SE are ME (which is SE minus some features, and with a new micro UI), as well as non-Sun/Oracle products that derive from SE today, such as Eclipse’s quasi-platform, and Android. Of course, it’s easy to play armchair architect: the devil is in the details, and Mark Reinhold mentioned on Java Posse 325 that there are some grievously difficult dependencies created by the unfortunate java.beans package. Still, when the cost of the desktop packages is so high, and their value so low, they almost certainly need to be moved off the critical path of Java’s evolution somehow. The most important thing Oracle needs to provide in Java 7 or 8 is an exit strategy from desktop Java.

Instead, we’ll continue to hear about what an utter rat-bastard Steve Jobs is, and how the deprecation of Apple’s Java is part of a scheme to “force developers to use Objective-C”, as if there were a flood of useful and popular Java applications being shoved off the Mac platform. Many of the ranters insist on dredging up Jobs’ vow to “make the Mac the best Java platform”, in determined ignorance of the fact that this statement was made over ten years ago, at JavaOne 2000. For context: when Jobs was on the JavaOne stage, the US President was Bill Clinton, and Sun was #150 on the Fortune 500, ahead of Oracle and Apple (and Google, which didn’t even enter the list until 2005). If TV’s Teen Titans taught us anything, it’s that Things Change.

And for a while, maybe the Mac was briefly the best Java platform: unlike Windows (legally enjoined from shipping Java by their attempts to subvert it) and Linux (where many distros turned up their noses at un-free Java for years), Apple shipped Java as a core part of the OS for years. Not an option: it was installed as part of the system and could not practically be removed. Apple’s Mac look-and-feel for Swing was also widely praised. Do you know who said the following?

I use the MAC because it’s a great platform. One of the nice things about developing in Java on the Mac is that you get to develop on a lovely machine, but you don’t cut yourself off from deploying on other platforms. It’s a fast and easy platform to develop on. Rock solid. I never reboot my machine… Really! Opening and closing the lid on a Powerbook actually works. The machine is up and running instantly when you open it up. No viruses. Great UI. All the Java tools work here: NetBeans and JEdit are the ones I use most. I tend to think of OSX and Linux with QA and Taste.

It was Java creator James Gosling, in a 2003 blog entry. As you might imagine, Apple dumping Java seven years later has him singing a different tune.

A lot of us who’ve developed Java on the Mac have expected this for years, and this week’s reactions are all a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The Java crowd will keep doing what it does — making web sites — but they’ll have to make a choice: either use Windows or Linux for development, or get away from the IDEs and write their code with plain text editors and the command line on the Mac. If I were still doing Java, I probably would barely notice, as I wrote nearly all my Java code with emacs after about 2000 or so, and never got hooked on NetBeans or Eclipse. But with the most appealing desktops and the most popular mobile devices ditching Java, it’s time for the Java community to face up to the fact that Desktop Java is a ruinously expensive legacy that they need to do something about.

All the angry screeds against Steve Jobs won’t change the fact that this is the “ball and chain” that’s pulling Java below the waves.