Need guidance on alternative JVMs for Apple OS X

Question

Apple has deprecated their JVM and it may not be supported in future versions of OS X. I am not primarily a Java developer, but I do write Java applications now and then, and the primary application I work on uses Tomcat and Opal to provide a SOAP interface to command line executables written in C.

I keep seeing suggestions to simply use another JVM, but this seems seem ridiculously glib. At this point I believe an Oracle JVM that runs on OS X is purely a hypothetical. It seems like a reasonable solution, but given that Apple, Oracle, and Google seem to be in a 3-way pissing match, I fear it may be delayed for quite some time.

I keep getting pointed to the OpenJDK, but this seems to require building the JVM from source. That's fine for me personally, but not so great for my end users. I'm also pointed to the Soy Latte binary distribution built from the OpenJDK, but this is an X11 rather then a native implementation, and seems to be require a Java Research License.

Can somebody point me to other JVMs for OS X, or disabuse me of any misconceptions I have about OpenJDK and SoyLatte?

Chiaroscuro

This is very bad news for both Apple and Oracle (or rather, their user communities) – Equalizer

We can only hope that Oracle will have one by the time 10.7 ships. I am thinking Apple discussed this with them. On the other hand, if Oracle was informed about this ahead of time, they would have issued a joint press release. – Voroshilovsk

Update: See answer to another SO question: #3992492 – Alienist

Answer 1

There is current no other mature JVM's for OS X than the one Apple provides. There has been no need to create one as Apple already provided one and the OpenJDK has not yet received interest and work enough to provide a production level version for OS X.

All the code Apple wrote to make it work well with Aqua is not open, so it cannot be reused. All we have is the OpenJDK which only has Windows and X11 frontend, so either Apple can be asked to donate the Aqua code to OpenJDK or work has to start over to create a new Aqua frontend.

Bharal

Answer 2

We all need guidance on this one, man. All of us that are developing with Java on Macbooks are wondering what will happen.

So far, nobody has bothered to create a production-ready port of OpenJDK to OS X because Apple was taking care of that until now. SoyLatte is a port of X11 java to OS X. What we need is Java ported to Cocoa. This only affects Swing/AWT but nonetheless.

Valenevalenka

Answer 3

OpenJDK 1.7 works flawlessly under OS X 10.7.3. I haven't succeeded in making it work under OS X 10.6.8. I haven't tried Oracle Java but you need it if you want to use JavaFX until OpenJFX is bundled with OpenJDK, probably in OpenJDK 1.9.

Kryska