The trunk

No, I’m not talking about a new release of that good movie but about a new release of its last 10 minutes.

Small introduction, skip if you are in a hurry
If you haven’t seen it, Pirates of Silicon Valley is a movie about the very first years of Apple and Microsoft. You will see how Apple has built its first computer and how Microsoft has sold the DOS to IBM. You will also see how this two new bigs has fought. At the end of that war (and the movie) you see Steve Jobs talking to an audience with Bill Gates displayed of the wall right behind him. Jobs says something like “This is Bill Gates. He’s our friend. Microsoft is our friend“.

And so..
The history says that Microsoft has won the war against Apple.

Only recently Apple has taken back some market share point, thanks to its FreeBSD operating system and to the cool design of the UI and of the computers.

But today I came in contact with Bootcamp, an Apple application that, starting from a Microsoft Windows XP cdrom, burns another one with Windows and all the required drivers to install it on a Mac, even adding a very cool bootloader. But Apple does not give support to Windows (that means to me: “I give you my hand, please don’t take the whole arm“).

I have already seen this, I have seen it in a movie.

I expect Apple to announce a new agreement with Microsoft, and Jobs saying again “They are our friends, again“. And I expect Apple to loose market shares, again.

But I know this will be just a goodbye, as it was some years ago.

While GNU Classpath is finally reaching its first release, Sun has recently released the 2nd beta of Mustang – Java 6.

For what I know, most and major applications (I’m talking about banking apps) still runs on Java 1.4, so it’s still worth developing with it.

If you were to choose the Java version of your next webapp or client, will you choose Java 5 (maybe hoping and waiting for Harmony), will you prefer 1.4 (planning to develop it with Classpath) or will you get yourself “on the edge” and use the latest build of Mustang?

I would prefer 1.4 as I don’t feel to trust Harmony that much…