Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Debugging Applets on OS X

So, despite Apple's best efforts to hide the Java Preferences dialog in OS X (Applications/Utilities/Java/Java Preferences in case you're still looking) enough people must have found it by now for Apple to move to the next step: cripple the dialog itself.

After installing the latest Java Update from Apple I noticed a redesigned Java Preferences dialog, which was certainly more compact than the previous version, mainly because Apple have removed the Applet runtime parameters field. So, if you want to set up your applet for remote debugging, change the default heap size or pass any other runtime parameter you now have to go an edit a file manually, as described at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3210

This may be fine for developers, although I don't see how it is an improvement over editing via the dialog that was there before this update, but instructing non-technical users on how to set up debugging or heap parameters for applets just got more difficult for no good reason.

3 comments:

HeyChinaski said...

That sucks. Is it only on Mac?

Jim said...

Yeah, it's OS X only. Apple do a lot of things well - supporting Java is not one of them.

Gary Thompson said...

I think the latest Mac JVM sucks. I've seen a loss in performance on a couple of applets.