Mike Chial wrote:
Thanks mbj for a cogent and reasonable observation about the need for simultaneius multiple generations of java. Many of us us who fight to stay functional with "high end" apps like Dreamweaver, Photoshop and others of the Adobe ilk just want a predictable playing field. It is no fun to watch 2 or 3 year old web sites crash because browser underpinnings have been updated in ways we can't even figure out.
By spraying Java installations on machines, it just shows the lack of a controlled specification to manage versions of Java. Does a consumer need to know how many JREs and JDKs exist on their machine? The architecture could have been chosen better, there is no standard to support multiple versions of Java installations, JREs vs JDKs. Look at my machine, how many more do I need? On OSX, how many versions of Finder exist? One...
We are now digressing from the OP and getting into software architectures, development methodologies, etc., but I understand developers need to support multiple versions and they should have as many as they want. The question is one related to consumer. Java has a 100+ flags, one of which on consumer environments can support something like a mode which specifies what version compatibility one wants to use for a specific environment. Linux machines have a spaghetti of Unix links (as does OSX) to deal with multi-versioning. For a consumer, there should be minimal intervention needed/required to manage Java.
Apple walked away from Java and let Oracle deal with such ill-defined holes when they acquired Sun.
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