Make Old Java Applications Fully Snow Leopard Compatible

If you have a bunch of old Java applications lying around in your Mac’s /Applications folder, chances are, you’ll come across this message box when you attempt to run them on Snow Leopard:

To open JavaApplicationStub, you need to install Rosetta. Would you like to install it now?

To open JavaApplicationStub, you need to install Rosetta. Would you like to install it now?

Personally, I try my best to avoid legacy Mac OS apps and haven’t found the need to install Rosetta on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as of yet. Whether you have need of Rosetta for your other applications or not, there’s no reason you should be running your Java-based applications through the Rosetta environment — they’ll run just fine on native Intel Java on OS X… with just a little bit of a prod in the right direction.

Java applications are CPU agnostic (hence the “write once, run everywhere” Java motto). The Java applets you download and use can theoretically be run on any PC machine that supports Java; be it Intel, PPC, ARM, SPARC, or more. The native Java virtual machine will translate the “Java bytecode” into the equivalent machine assembly that your PC uses and understands, and therefore, Java code written for legacy Mac OS should run just fine on Snow Leopard

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Please Microsoft, Stop Holding .NET Back!

As dedicated developers, end-users, and champions of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, we’re making a final plea to Microsoft and the .NET Framework team to save .NET and make it a real multi-platform framework. Please!

Sun could (and did) do it with Java, so why can’t Microsoft just swallow the pill already and provide real support for the .NET Framework on all operating systems? Yes, that includes Linux and Mac too. It’s ironic, because the .NET Framework has so much potential as a platform with its unique multi-language structure, nifty features, excellent libraries, (relatively) well-performing output, and darn-good innovative technologies like LINQ coming-up and XAML already here. Yet Microsoft just doesn’t realize that if they truly want .NET to succeed, they’ll have to bite the bullet and stop pretending that only officially supporting Windows won’t make users leave Linux/Mac/BSD/Whatever and buy licenses for Windows instead.

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Is .NET Taking Over the World?

4 short years ago, Microsoft unveiled its new framework/engine for programming and running applications in a virtual environment, and the world was stunned. Microsoft had introduced a run-time environment that was for the first time a true “Write once, run everywhere” implementation, but that was far from being the end. With .NET 3.0 on the loom, NeoSmart Technologies takes a look at how far .NET has come and just how long it can keep going.

Besides being a true virtual machine implementation that really does work everywhere no matter how terrible your code is, .NET is paving the way for a revolution that’ll end with it either dead or the only language worth using.. and from what we see, it sure isn’t the first!

Update: Once you’re done reading, here’s a follow-up that should clear some things up.

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Configuring JSP for IIS

Many people love the ease and security of using Internet Information Services 6 server on Windows 2003. Adding PHP and ASP support is a cinch, and in no time at all, IIS 6 can serve anything you throw at it – except JSP files of course. By no stretch of imagination is getting JSP running invisibly with IIS 6 an easy job, and here’s the best way to do it.

In this guide, we’ll be using IIS 6 on Windows Server 2003 with SP1 installed, together with the Tomcat servlet engine (version 5.5.17 stable) to parse the JSP files that IIS may encounter. It covers all the prerequisites and how to get them up and running.

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And We Thought Java was the Same Everywhere!

Java. It’s that old language that runs code in a highly bloated virtual machine at slow speeds and terrible performance, especially on the Web. On a local PC, a Java’s just pure slow, but on the web Java can be a real headache. However, it has its benefits too — or so we thought. There are only two reasons someone would use Java in a website today: they wanted to write a complex program/script really quick and they needed it to just work regardless of browser or platform. After all, Java is Java, no matter if you’re on Windows, Linux, or Mac; or use Firefox, Opera, or even Internet Explorer… But it’s not!

First, to clarify: this isn’t an article about Java, and it especially isn’t an attack on Java, not today. This is about Opera 9, the wonderful and highly-innovative browser that can do anything and everything with less memory than its competitors and with much less time too. But it breaks Java.

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