* does the fact that I will never be installing a DP create a
chicken/egg situation where Apple won't finally come around to
making 1.5 an official platform default due to testing but people
like me not testing?
Nope - it means that your apps will not be tested with upcoming JDKs,
so the first warning you have that your apps have failed is when the
users get the new JDK via software update. It is thus worth finding
a way to test before release, though if you do not have a shipping
app, you might only need to test your development environment. After
all, Eclipse, IDEA, and other major tool bugs are very likely to be
found by someone else, while a bug in SonicMQ is not so clearly going
to be found.
An external drive is one way to test for just over a hundred bucks.
SuperDuper makes the process of duping a drive quite painless. I do
this often to test a new release.
* why does Apple's bundling differ so radically from sun's dist.
format (basically everything under a JAVA_HOME) which lends itself
to one-off trying of any release version. I don't really accept
"end users need to be isolated from JDK versions" as a reason.
There's easy ways to maintain that facade without hamstringing
developers.
They do not want to test and qualify versions other than the current
blessed one. In essence, they figure that any bug which makes a new
JDK a deal killer for your app deserves either a workaround on your
part, or a bug fix on theirs. Further, it means that, barring Sun
JDK bugs, they can optimize just one version of the JDK and save on
memory footprint.
Apple is a for profit company, and has made their call about how best
to maximize sales and long term platform success. I do find their
policy to be good for users, middlin for developers. Sun, IBM, and
others have made different decisions, and were they to offer a JDK
for the platform, we would get the benefits of other people playing.
I am hopeful about the new Apache effort, but I note that GNU has not
really managed to get full parity with Sun. Hope they do well.
Remember, nothing stops Sun or IBM from offering a JDK for the
platform, but they have not found it worth doing as yet.
* Apple says "do not install on critical systems". I have one
Mac. I'd love to have more, but they cost money. Substantially
more money than the wintel boxen that are more typically "lying
around". Am I truly in the minority where I don't have spare
mac's for one-time DP installations?
An external drive costs as little as $130, and it is quite easy to
set up a dev system with one. Products such as SuperDuper make it
trivial, in fact, to dupe your current config to an external firewire
drive, which you can then test with a new update at essentially no risk.
any thoughts out there?
I have been through a number of OS releases where I tested most
betas, as well as several JDK tests, and an external drive has worked
wonders for me. Since my daily backups are to external drives, I
usually have at least two or three lying about to test new software
releases on. For those who do it more often, partitioning your main
drive works very well too.
Scott
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