Experience on Mac OS X for JavaEE Development

[Nicky Moelholm]

Hi Guys,

I know that it is close to the previously post on Mac Air. Sorry for that....

However could you guys please let me know pros and cons for selecting a macbook pro with leopard as my primary development laptop? I will be doing a lot of Java development.... so I really would be sad to realize that Eclipse / Glassfish / JBoss / ANT / Maven / etc. does not work optimally.

I have been using Windows XP etc. for development earlier. That was fine.
After my Windows adventures I then chose to try out Ubuntu / Mint. That was fine too.

Although this probably is a biased forum I am now considering whether I would benefit from choosing a:
- Windows 7 ( sorry guys) on some Lenovo stuff... Or,
- Mac OS X Snow Leopard on a Macbook Pro ( when it hits the market soon )

Any ideas or guidelines ?

[Andrew Monkhouse]

I'm currently using a MacBook Pro as my main development machine - it has Leopard (10.5.7) on it.

Running 100% of the time:

JBoss

Tomcat (separate from the one included in JBoss)

Jetty

MySQL

Postgres

Hudson

Apache

svn (through Apache & standalone)

Running when I need them (which seems like 100% of the time):

Eclipse

Firefox

Safari

Internet Explorer

Ant (standalone + running through Eclipse + running through Hudson jobs)

Flex builder

DB Visualizer

Open Office

Microsoft Office

So - what was it you were worried about not working correctly?

I have used Maven a couple of times on this computer, but it is not a tool I use regularly.

I also have Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux installed on this MacBook Pro. Although they rarely get booted.

I have no idea whether Windows 7 will be suitable as a development environment or not. I am hearing rumours that it is good, however none of the people I am hearing the rumours from are using it for any heavy duty applications - so I still don't know. One local paper recently did a bake-off between Windows and OS/X and declared that there was not enough difference between them as far as ease of use was concerned - but then in the small print he said he was comparing Windows 7 beta with OS/X.

[Hussein Baghdadi]

While I think Mac OSX is best OS for development, their JDK delation has always scared me.

[Bear Bibeault]

The only possible down-side is that the latest JDK usually lags behind Sun's release for other platforms. This has personally never been an issue for me as I work in a production environment where updating to the latest JDK doesn't happen until long after it has been out and proven in the field.

By the time I need the "latest and greatest", it's always been available.

[Bear Bibeault]

Oh, and like Andrew, I have no problem running any of the software that I need. I won't repeat Andrew's list, but add things like Illustrator and Photoshop (I'm also the designer for our project) to the stack of JEE products and projects.

[Nicky Moelholm]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for answering.

I might even dare go with the mac approach now:

[Mark Spritzler]

Once you go Mac, you never go back. It is well worth it.



Mark

[David Newton]

I've had issues with the latest IntelliJ release, but I haven't really pursued the issue to see what the problem is.

Other than that my main non-work Java machine has been a 17" MBP (recently upgraded to 10.5) and it's been great.

[Rene Larsen]

Bear Bibeault wrote:The only possible down-side is that the latest JDK usually lags behind Sun's release for other platforms. This has personally never been an issue for me as I work in a production environment where updating to the latest JDK doesn't happen until long after it has been out and proven in the field.

By the time I need the "latest and greatest", it's always been available.

On Apple's developer site http://connect.apple.com/ you can download the latest java release.

Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 5 Developer Preview (9M3092)

java version "1.6.0_15"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_15-b03-223)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.1-b02-92, mixed mode)

java version "1.5.0_20"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_20-b02-312)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_19-140, mixed mode, sharing)

java version "1.4.2_22"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_22-b02-329)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-92, mixed mode)