3/25/2019 0 Comments Best Mac Apps For Java Developers![]() Of the three I've used (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows), I consider Linux the best place to do Java development. My primary personal machine is a Mac, and I've done quite a lot of Java development there and been happy with it. Unfortunately, however, Apple lags behind the official JDK releases and you're pretty much limited to the few versions they choose to provide. My employer-provided machine is an old P4 crate from HP which I use mostly to keep my feet warm. The real work occurs 'Oberon', on a 2.6 GHz quad-core running Ubuntu 8.04 in 32-bit mode [1]. The two advantages I notice day-to-day compared with Windows are: • A powerful command line, which helps me automate the boring little stuff. Best to-do list apps of 2019 for managing tasks for the Mac The 5 best weather apps with the most accurate forecast Keep your photos safe in the cloud with the best online photo storage for 2019. • Far superior file system performance. (I'm currently using EXT3 because I'm becoming conservative in my old age. I used ReiserFS previously, which was even faster for the sorts of operations one typically performs on large workspaces checked out of subversion.) You can get those advantages from a mac too, but Linux offers another nice bonus: • Remote X11: Before my $EMPLOYER provided e-mail and calendar via web, I had to be on the Windows box to read my mail and see my meetings, so I used Cygwin's X11. This allowed my to run the stuff on Linux but display it on my windows desktop. [1] I used to run Ubuntu in 64-bit mode, but I had no end of trouble. (Mixing 64-bit and 32-bit is something Mac OS X does much better.) 7.04 worked fine running 32-bit applications on the 64-bit kernel. 7.10 broke the linux32 script and the ability to install new 32-bit applications though old ones continued to (mostly) run. 8.04 killed 32-bit java by making it impossible to connect to the network from a 32-bit JVM (no more updates for Eclipse). Running Eclipse 64-bit didn't work reliably. The then current version of oXygen would only run (grudgingly) under the IBM 64-bit VM which would work for about 10 minutes until it stopped getting keyboard events. I finally gave up in frustration and used my Mac for a few months until I had enough slack time to do a 32-bit install of 8.04 on the linux box. Now everything works again and I'm quite happy. Develop on whatever you like. As a java programmer you might want to avoid Mac OS X, primarily because new features seem to have been significantly delayed, and also because you can find you've no longer got a machine that supports the new versions of Java. Having said that I imagine developing on Mac OS X must be very nice (command line interface, dtrace, nice OS). I develop on windows with IntelliJ 7. It's ok, but needs some hefty hardware. I then deploy onto solaris/linux. Unless you're writing GUI's or integrating with C++ code, you should be fine choosing whatever takes your fancy. I believe you should stick to the OS you are the most comfortable with, or which is the most available to a large group (of developers), like for instance a set of PCs on Windows. It is rare to need to do in-depth tuning on development platform. You would reserve all those dtrace and other performance tuning to assembly platform (for example in Linux), for daily deployments where everything is recompiled and unit-tested. And then you could set up a special JVM (like IBM JRockit instead of Sun JRE) to do some analysis on your integration platform, where all your system can be tested from front to back, with stress and non-regression test And finally, make all UAT (User Acceptance Tests) on a pre-production platform (which can be an expensive F15K or SunFire880 or V490 or.), with the target JRE used there. My point is: there is so many parameters to take into account between development and release into production that switching OS at such an early stage may prove unnecessary. I've used Linux, Windows and OS X. My big argument in favour of OS X is that it is user friendly operating system (ie. I can run iTunes, most modern browsers, and don't need to allocate 50% of my time maintaining it on a laptop like linux) with a unix foundation. As most my development is for unix systems, this makes life hugely more productive. Also, there is a more and more active development community behind the platform here. These reason also work in reverse for Windows - while cygwin closes some of my requirements for using unix tools - it's nothing like having a real unix system. My best advice is to develop on the platform that you are targeting.
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