Although CodeWarrior will continue to provide Java tools for the embedded, small-device, and desktop markets, its current strength for the Mac market is in helping developers create applications for Mac OS X. Luis Quiroga, Metrowerks' product marketing manager, said that Metrowerks still has mindshare on the Mac. In recent years the Java IDE of choice for the Mac has been Metrowerks' CodeWarrior. Since then, Inprise has announced that it will formally offer a version of JBuilder for Mac OS X. It also shows that "write once, run anywhere" is possible.
JBuilder is an application with thousands of classes that, according to Apple's Naroff, was ported quickly using the existing JBuilder distribution verbatim - without modification or involvement from Inprise! JBuilder provides a great stress test for the Mac OS X JVM.
At Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference in May, there was a demo of Inprise's JBuilder IDE running on Mac OS X. This means that IDEs written in Java that require Java 2 support can be easily ported to the Mac. With Mac OS X, the Mac has a fast, modern version of Java right out of the box. This changed a couple of years ago on the Mac when tool vendors and browser companies decided to standardize on Apple's Macintosh Runtime for Java (MRJ).
Finally, other tool vendors were writing their own VMs for various platforms, including the Mac. In Roaster's day, the lag never dipped below one year. At the time, Apple kept promising that the lag between the time that new versions of Java were available on Windows and the time that they are available on the Mac would reduce until it was around 60 days. Being a Mac product meant that it wasn't able to take advantage of the newest versions of Java that were available on other platforms. Unfortunately for the Roaster, back then Java was slow and didn't yet support Swing or the current event model. Available only on the Mac, the idea for the now-defunct product was that it would be portable to other platforms and be in a unique position to support the language. Three years ago, Roaster was an IDE written in Java. With Mac OS X, the choices of an integrated development environment (IDE) expand greatly.