Java 7 for Mac OSX

[Richard Bair]

I was talking with Scott in the hall this morning and we were (we thought) of two different minds on this until we teased out the assumptions we were making. It deserves a longer post. But in summary, I don't have any problem with there being a system wide installed JRE (in fact, something like this presently has to exist for WebStart and Applets to work, anyway). However, having multiple system wide installed JREs is a disaster (see our windows deployment headaches).

So I don't have a problem with an App relying on THE ONE AND ONLY installed JRE, which for security purposes is always and ever updated to the very latest version. However if your application doesn't want to run the risk of breakage, then it should co-bundle, rather than installing another system wide JRE of a different version. For my money, I'd always co-bundle (desktop apps) and if my desktop app were accepting remote connections, I'd take responsibility to make sure it was secure.

Richard