Stephen Withers
Friday, 26 September 2008 04:46
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
The Java updates rolled out by Apple this week include security patches as well as other improvements, but the company skipped over some of Sun's revisions.
Java is a programming language and associated software designed to allow programs to run on different hardware without recompilation. A common use is to create applets that run inside web pages.
While Java was originally developed by Sun in the 1990s, it was more recently open sourced, although the company still plays a major part in the project.
Apple released two Java updates for Mac OS X this week.
For Leopard, "Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 2 delivers improved reliability and compatibility for Java SE 6, J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4.2 on Mac OS X 10.5.4 and later," noted the company.
And for Tiger, "Java for Mac OS X 10.4, Release 7 delivers improved reliability and compatibility for Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 and Java 1.4 on Mac OS X 10.4.11 and later."
Reliability and compatibility are always good things to have. But the updates each deliver an extensive list of security fixes, some specific to Apple's implementation, and some to Java more generally.
Please turn to
page two where we'll first deal with the Apple-specific issues.
