What’s my chance of success if I force people to upgrade to 1.5 to play my applet game demo? Does anyone happen to know what kind of install base there is for 1.5? Also what’s the chance people won’t even try the game because they have to download the huge plugin?
Thanks!
After about 1.4 we started using an auto-updater the way windows does, so if they have instaqlled at elast 1.4 they shoudl be automaticly updated to 1.5 or later.
If they havent not installed a 1.4 vm them you will need to get them to download it. what percentage of your amrekt this will be is a bity unrepdictable because it depends on your market dynamics. For the past year or so I believe more then 50% of new PCs have shipped with the VM. Older PCs are more of a crap shoot.
Edit: I should mention that if what you want to use is 1.5 prgorammign constructus but don’t actually need 1.5 API calls, you might try a tool one of the guys wrote her that messages JDK1.5 byte code back into a form executable by earlier VMs. I forget the name but Im sure someone around here remembers…
Are these updates also true for Mac OS?
No. We only control/support the J2SE WIn32 and Linux VMs.
Apple supportst heir own VM. Traditionally they have only updated the VM along with an OS update, but I dont know if they are goign to continue that way or not.
The next update on Mac for Java 5 will come as part of the standard “System Update” mechanism and will install Java 5 as the default JRE (the current Java 5 manual download for Mac leaves 1.4.2 as the default for cases when Java 5 is not specified, e.g. via JNLP)
I expect that some time in January Mac OS X will be at the same release as Win32 and Linux (1.5.0_06)
While the Mac platform is likely to always lag the Sun releases, it seems that the Apple folks are now better equipped to get their implementation out in a timely manner. I don’t think the wait for Java 6 on Mac will be as bad as it was for Java 5.