References to Apple JDK internal classes from other projects

[Artem Ananiev]

Hi, Mike et al.,

I'm often contacted from other teams and projects about JDK7 on Mac. At 
the current moment, at least two requests are about Apple classes that 
are missed in Oracle JDK:

Java3D: they reference apple.awt.CGraphicsDevice
SWT: they use apple.awt.CEmbeddedFrame to embed Swing content

I would expect many other Mac OS X applications written in Java to rely 
on classes like these. Quick search for "import apple.awt" in Google 
shows at least 2 projects in top 10 results.

There are several options, but none of them looks perfect:

1. Force application developers to fork their code to run with JDK6 and 
JDK7+

2. Re-implement all the Apple classes in JDK7 (and place them to the 
same package?) It may be very hard, if possible at all, to preserve 
exactly the same behavior, though.

3. Add more APIs to com.apple.eawt both in JDK6 and JDK7 to use instead 
of direct references to Apple classes. What about classes that are not 
related to AWT?

4. Ignore such requests as all the applications relying on apple.*, or 
sun.*, or whatever else packages can be declared "unsupported".

Your ideas?

Thanks,

Artem