JRE & JDK now available to OS X developers | Hacker News Reader

JRE & JDK now available to OS X developers

oracle.com

91 pointsBraasch32 comments

Note that the JRE installs to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin only, so it cannot easily be used by Java desktop applications and appears to be for applets only.

It also installs a System Preferences plugin that opens up a custom Swing-based settings panel that looks awful on a Retina MBP. It tries to replicate the look of the standard Apple Java Preferences app, but is confusing because it doesn't affect the system Java that you'd see when doing 'which java' from the command line.

The installer script then sets the permissions on /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin to root:wheel. This is the same as the bundled Java installations.

This does seem weird to me, as you said the java executable by default gets installed to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin/Contents/Home/bin/java. Whereas the java executable within the jdk package gets installed to /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_06.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java.

"...custom Swing-based settings panel that looks awful on a Retina MBP."

For those of us without Retina MBP's, could you upload a screenshot?

Sure:

http://i46.tinypic.com/25qu9a9.png http://i47.tinypic.com/2hhq3ae.jpg http://i47.tinypic.com/2j2xrm0.jpg

The images compressed a little on upload, so it actually looks even worse than in the image. The contrast between the sharp text everywhere else and the fuzzy Swing window is jarring.

For those who want to know, here is what is inside the .pkg files within the DMG. If you want to have a custom install directory in a non OSX specific directory structure then you can extract the packages and it should work appropriately.

JDK: https://gist.github.com/3353638

JRE: https://gist.github.com/3353662

I'm not sure what is the news here, I've been using OS X for five months and one of the first things I did was to get JDK from Oracle. I understand that Apple has stopped distributing it and Oracle will be the standard source to get JRE and JDK but I don't get how it was unavailable before this press release. Am I missing something? Otherwise title is misleading.

Buried in this press release is support for ARM (and the Raspberry Pi)

So speaking just in terms of the JRE, is there any reason to download it from Oracle instead of Apple? A separate Oracle updating program is a much less elegant solution than the current Software Updates integration that Apple uses.

Main reason; the Apple JRE is still Java 6 (and will remain so for eternity).

Apple has EOL'd its Java and told people to switch to Oracle's version. That's a pretty good reason IMO.

Apple's already removed their own JRE from default OS X installs, demand-loading it only with explicit user authorization.

Furthermore they've sent out recent security updates partially disabling applet loading in web browsers and disabling the JVM entirely if it hasn't been used in a long while.

I think that the next step of completely shuttering Apple's JRE demand-loader will be a straight-up security win for most end-users, ensuring that only those who require Java have it.

Photoshop and other Adobe apps have components written in Java. Without Java, those components will silently fail. Thus, the on-demand Java installation hooks will be present for as long as current versions of CS are supported on OS X. For reference, Adobe CS 3, released 5 years ago, is still supported by Mountain Lion: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/faq.html#a139_12...

I suspect the on-demand Java installation process will be around for quite some time.

Ach, you're right. The extensions loader alone blows up on boot. It'd be infeasible to remove the Apple JRE from the field. So much for my pet theory.

Here I am hoping for something like project jigsaw (or something else) to make it easy to modularize my applications and redistribute/install only the JRE pieces I need, and then I read "Starting with this release, JavaFX is now fully integrated into Oracle's Java SE implementation"

So much for a less bloated runtime. I confess I am not sure how big of a size impact JavaFX has (and I'm reasonably sure it has no runtime impact).

At this point jigsaw won't even be in Java 8 - it's been bumped to Java 9 - think 2015...

For the time being OSGi seems to be the only viable solution.

Does anybody know how to integrate this into OSX so that it is known to the Java Preferences app ? (/Applicatons/Utilities/Java Preferences.app)

I've been using Oracle supplied JDK in the last five months and it's been always present there: http://cl.ly/image/07422e283m0G

Thanks. I had only installed the JRE. When I installed the JDK it showed up in there for me too.

Direct links for downloading Mac OS X versions (*.dmg)

JRE: http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u6-b24/jre-7u6-...

JDK: http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u6-b24/jdk-7u6-...

Oracle downloads rely on a cookie being set after agreeing to the license.

You'll need to start off here:

JRE: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre7...

JDK: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk7...

Worked just fine clicking the link to the DMG.

You may have an existing license-acceptance cookie depending on what else you might have done. Clear any oracle cookies and try again. You'll run into a fail page.

(I've worked on scripting JDK installs so have had to go around this by coding the cookie into curl and wget calls)

Dumb question: are there any reasons not to install the updated JDK/JRE?

E.g., any known backward compatibility issues or bad experiences anyone's encountered (aside from looking bad on a retina display)?

What would I gain over Java6? I don't use java for anything, except, I have a couple of apps on my machine that make use of it.

Java 7 is faster in some cases. Also, some Java apps will require Java 7 — but obviously that doesn't apply to you if you aren't planning on using any new Java apps and those don't force an upgrade.

Security enhancements, among other things.

Though, of course, you know better than clicking 'yes' on a random trojan installer, so maybe you don't need the security updates.

Java 7 has lots of enhancements for dynamic languages and some new things like NIO2 for asynchronous services (vert.x, for example, requires java 7)

As a user it only makes sense to keep up with security updates, to use applications that depend on Java 7, the JIT compiler is also faster.

As a developer, even if some features got postponed to Java 8, it still has lots of nice new features to get your hands on.

This made my day:

"JavaFX 2.2 introduces full Linux support for both x86 and x64 systems."

does this require lion like the earlier beta installers did?

ANSWER - requires Lion.

Earlier betas indicated 'works on Snow Leopard', though I'm not sure how they tested it, because it never installed. Later site pages just said 'tested on Lion' or something like that.

There was a google code site that offered built versions with installers that worked on Snow Leopard (supposedly) but I could never get those to install right either.

Am I destined to have to upgrade to Lion/ML just to get Java7. ???

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