[Biojava-l] JDK 1.4 and Macs

[Dr S.M. Huen]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Keith Satterley wrote:

> Macintosh support is critical to me!
> 
I would echo Keith's comment: the Mac is still a major platform in
academia.  The majority of machines in my both Cambridge depts and the
Bham dept before that (all biological depts) have been Macs.  The
situation is not changing either: the majority of new purchases recently
have been Macs too.

The fact remains though that biojava is not deployed to any significant
extent on Macs primarily because of the absence of a decent modern MRJ
prior to OS/X.  A quick migration to OS/X is unlikely given its poor
performance on older kit and flakiness of native MSIE currently.  I think
it likely that when the time such a migration does occur, 1.4 will
probably become available on OS/X too. (And as for older Macs, Yellow Dog
Linux does offer Java-1.3.0beta 02 and runs fine on any PCI-based Mac.  As
for persuading a Mac user to migrate to Linux,<silent> muuahahahaha... </silent>).

Might I suggest remaining on 1.3 API at least until 1.4 becomes an
official stable release and having a 1.3 based stable biojava release then
prior to moving to features in the 1.4 API? This does not constrain us
from using the 1.4 beta tools now, only from using 1.4-specific API
features in code destined for that 1.3-based final release.  It does also
offer a version usable with 1.3 in the unlikely event Apple is delayed
with their Java 1.4 release.

David Huen, Dept. of Genetics, Cambridge