Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 12:29 pm Post subject: Re: Apple says Java is deprecated
valterb wrote:
Does this have any consequence to NeoOffice?
Not yet. NeoOffice works fine with the recent Java system updates for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6.
If you are worried about whether NeoOffice will run on Mac OS X 10.7, the least of our problems (and OpenOffice.org as well) is whether Apple supports Java. Apple routinely deprecates APIs which is the primary reason that we do not support older versions of Mac OS X like Jaguar or Panther. Apple eventually stops supporting something in the next Mac OS X version after something has been declared deprecated and replaces it with something new but different. This means that we have to do two things whenever Apple pushes out a new version of Mac OS X with major changes:
1. Drop support for older Mac OS X versions that have only the old APIs and do not have the new APIs that replaced them
2. Refactor our code that uses the old APIs to use the newer replacement APIs
I have no idea what will be in Mac OS X 10.7 (I only have access to the same news reports you do), but Java is not the only deprecated APIs out there. Given that lots of APIs were marked as deprecated when Snow Leopard came out, I suspect that Apple is going to do some very significant changes in Mac OS X 10.7 that will likely require all applications to make significant changes to their code.
For NeoOffice, the issue is not can we make those changes. Instead, the issue will be how much time will they require which, in turn, means how much fundraising will be needed in early 2011 to fund Mac OS X 10.7 support.
At this point, we do know of a few things that will need to be reimplemented. This is definitely not a complete list, but is merely the known items:
1. Text layout - In order to support Mac OS X 10.4, we have used the "ATSUI" text layout functions that have been in all versions of Mac OS X that have been released to date. However, starting in Mac OS X 10.5, Apple added the new "CoreText" replacement text layout functions and so I expect that the ATSUI functions will be removed in Mac OS X 10.7. So, we (and OpenOffice.org as well) will need to make Mac OS X 10.5 the minimum supported version and reimplement all text layout code to use the newer CoreText functions.
2. Copy/paste/drag/drop - Like text layout, we have used the old "ScrapManager" and "DragManager" functions and I expect that they will be removed in Mac OS X 10.7. So we will need to reimplement our code to use the "PBPasteboard" functions.
Both of these will require months of efforts. Unfortunately, since my family responsibilities prevent me from working on the above items much, we will likely need to do fundraising before we start so that we can hire people like Ed or other possible engineers a salary to do this work.
Once more details come out of Apple, we will try to estimate the worst case cost for upgrading and supporting NeoOffice on Mac OS X 10.7 and put together some fundraising pages on our website.
I forgot to add that while the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 will likely be expensive, with adequate funding we can move away from a Java-based GUI in NeoOffice. What many of you may not realize is that over the last few years I have been continually replacing Java code with native code as Java did not provide the precise control over behavior that we sometimes needed in NeoOffice.
Right now, all of the following areas of code are native:
- Text layout
- Copy/paste/drag/drop
- Native controls rendering
- Printing
- Export to PDF
- Services support
- NeoOffice Mobile support
Granted, we will need to replace some remaining Java code such as window display and drawing, menu display, and offscreen drawing, but that is not not that technically difficult. Instead, it is just a time consuming and testing intensive process of reimplementing the code.
Should our users be able to fund the above (I will try to get a Mac OS X 10.7 upgrade fundraising webpage on our site in November), the only pieces of Java left in NeoOffice would be the non-GUI Java code in OpenOffice.org's Base and Calc code. If Apple does not bundle Java in Mac OS X 10.7, then the non-GUI Java code in Base and Calc can be handled by bundling an OpenJDK build in the NeoOffice installer.
Joined: Jun 11, 2006 Posts: 481 Location: Great Britain
Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2010 11:29 am Post subject:
Patrick, thank you for giving us an honest and detailed appraisal. Looks like this cloud may have a silver lining. I'll certainly do what I can to help with the fundraising.
PS: I edited the original post just now because that super long URL was throwing the page formatting, causing unnecessary horizontal scrolling.
Oracle and Apple today announced the OpenJDK project for Mac OS X... Java SE 6 will continue to be available from Apple for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion. Java SE 7 and future versions of Java for Mac OS X will be available from Oracle.
Oracle and Apple today announced the OpenJDK project for Mac OS X... Java SE 6 will continue to be available from Apple for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion. Java SE 7 and future versions of Java for Mac OS X will be available from Oracle.
I saw that too. Hopefully, "Java SE 6 will continue to be available from Apple" means that it will be preinstalled on Mac OS X, not some optional installation from your installation disk.
We will just have to wait until a developer preview of Lion is available.
I saw that too. Hopefully, "Java SE 6 will continue to be available from Apple" means that it will be preinstalled on Mac OS X, not some optional installation from your installation disk.
I forgot to add that NeoOffice does not need the latest, greatest version of Java to work. So if Java SE 6 (the version that is currently bundled with Snow Leopard) comes pre-installed on Lion and Java is still stable, then we should only have to deal with the normal set of new bugs that appear with a new Mac OS X release.
If possible, can you install the following test patch and verify that copy and pasting still works for you?
I ask this because I have reimplemented NeoOffice's copy and paste code so that NeoOffice no longer uses functions that Apple is likely to remove in their upcoming Mac OS X 10.7 Lion release.
Below are links to the test patch. If you find any breakage in NeoOffice's copy and paste functionality after installing the test patch, please let us know so that I can fix any breakage before we put this code into an official patch:
I have finished reimplementing NeoOffice's drag and drop code so that NeoOffice no longer uses functions that Apple is likely to remove in their upcoming Mac OS X 10.7 Lion release.
If possible, can you install the following test patch and tell us if you find any breakage in NeoOffice's drag and drop functionality?:
FYI. I have included the new copy, paste, drag, and drop code in NeoOffice 3.1.2 Patch 3. You can download the patch from the NeoOffice patch download page.
Please let us know if you find any new copy, paste, drag, or drop issues with Patch 3 and we will investigate them immediately.
Thanks for the link. I do not have any machines that support installation of the current Lion developer so I cannot investigate. However, Apple will expand Lion to support all Intel Macs. Once we have a Mac that supports one of the Lion developer releases, I will investigate how the Java installation dialogs are triggered so that we can trigger that at installation (for new Lion installations) and at launch (for upgraded Lion installations).
I have upgraded a development laptop to 10.7, I was already running NeoOffice 3.1.2 Patch 4. After installation, I tried running NeoOffice. A dialog popped up saying I needed a java runtime, Lion then downloaded that and installed it for me automatically. The process was almost completely transparent.
I've spent the best part of a day using NeoOffice Writer on 10.7 and found remarkably few problems. I can cause NeoOffice to crash when opening a file and using the file dialog to select two files simultaneously (it isn't possible to select two files this way in 10.6, and I have no clue if that is a 10.7 feature, or bug...!). I had trouble with the auto-document recovery after this crash, not quite sure what happened there, not a bug I've been able to reproduce.
No apparent issues with the CoreText. Copy and paste worked fine within Writer, and between writer and Apple's TextEditor, but I haven't had a need to try anything more fancy than that just yet.
Overall, I'm impressed with how stable the code already is; on a first developer preview of Lion I was expecting much worse. I'll continue to use it and report back any issues I find.
I have upgraded a development laptop to 10.7, I was already running NeoOffice 3.1.2 Patch 4. After installation, I tried running NeoOffice. A dialog popped up saying I needed a java runtime, Lion then downloaded that and installed it for me automatically. The process was almost completely transparent.
That is really nice to know that when NeoOffice tries to load Java it triggers Mac OS X 10.7's Java installation dialog. I was worried that we would have to add code to force that dialog to display.
jongooch wrote:
I've spent the best part of a day using NeoOffice Writer on 10.7 and found remarkably few problems. I can cause NeoOffice to crash when opening a file and using the file dialog to select two files simultaneously (it isn't possible to select two files this way in 10.6, and I have no clue if that is a 10.7 feature, or bug...!). I had trouble with the auto-document recovery after this crash, not quite sure what happened there, not a bug I've been able to reproduce.
I would be very interested to see the crash log if 10.7 wrote it to disk as I should be able to determine it from the crash log if the crash is occurring in Apple's code or ours. If the crash log is in the same place as described in "Option B" of this NeoWiki article, would you be willing to attach the crash log?
jongooch wrote:
No apparent issues with the CoreText. Copy and paste worked fine within Writer, and between writer and Apple's TextEditor, but I haven't had a need to try anything more fancy than that just yet.
That is very good news. Since NeoOffice 3.1.2 still uses the older ATSUI text rendering functions, I was worried that Apple would remove those and the missing functions would cause NeoOffice to crash on launch.
We are still working on replacing the ATSUI functions with CoreText. We have also already made all functions that Apple deprecated load dynamically as we when we started working on this we didn't know if the deprecated functions would be removed or not. We have not yet set a date for the CoreText release, but it should be in the next month or two so that we can fix most of the issues that users who have access to the Lion developer releases are likely to find.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum
