Inspirational Technology

Java on Mac OS X

I mentioned in my rant about window proliferation on Mac OS X that I was looking at using JEdit as a solution. It turns out JEdit is almost a perfectly workable solution, through various plugins I was able to get it to do everything that I wanted and it felt close enough to a native app to not drive me crazy. Unfortunately, all is not well in this world.

The JDK on Mac OS X has some serious problems when running JEdit. With the 1.4 JDK the VM crashes far too often. This shouldn't be JEdit's fault as it's the VM that's crashing. Unless jEdit is running some native code a Java app should never be able to crash the VM. This wouldn't have been a huge deal as JEdit is really good about saving its current state, just restarting the app is a minor annoyance. However, the real problem is that sometimes when the VM crashes it takes the whole WindowServer process down with it. This results in instant termination of all your running apps and getting logged out of the system. To say that's a bit of a problem is an understatement.

When you install jEdit it recommends that you use the 1.3 VM. Unfortunately doing this also results in the loss of a number of functions (in particular mouse scroll wheel support) and substantially changes the display of the app (i.e. tab layouts). Also if you turn on the hardware acceleration it has problems with garbled text and incorrect positioning in text areas. Running without mouse scroll wheel support is extremely annoying.

I'm quite disappointed with the current situation of Java on Mac OS X for running GUI apps. I've had no problems with it running server apps, it seems most of the current problems can be traced to the things they're doing with Swing, i.e hardware acceleration and the switch to the Cocoa toolkit for GUIs in 1.4. This stuff will be great once it's fully stable, but I've heard nothing about progress in this area for some time.

I'm still trying to make do with jEdit running on the 1.3 VM with no hardware acceleration. However, I would definitely prefer to be able to take advantage of the 1.4 features, that scroll wheel thing can really spoil you.