The Google web toolkit was the hit of JavaOne. ONJava blogger Robert Cooper gushed on Wednesday: “I just saw the presentation at Java One, and I am here to tell you, this isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is the greatest thing since CHEESE.”
Mac OS X users were disappointed to see only Windows and Linux downloads. (On the O’Reilly editors’ backchannel, Daniel Steinberg wrote: “I think this is Windows or Linux only – like a surprising amount of J1 news. Chris Adamson pointed out that many of the booths which had Windows only solutions were staffed by engineers using Macs.”) But Brian Jepson went and tried out the Linux download on Mac OS X, and found it (mostly) works. He wrote:
Mac users might think they are locked out: on the download page, you can choose Windows or Linux. And if you download either one, you might be discouraged to find shared libraries in the form of .dll or .so files. The Linux version does work on the Mac, [though], but you won’t be able to run it in hosted mode since that mode depends on SWT (that’s what those shared libraries are there for, apparently). Hosted mode gives you more debugging power, so you are giving that up on the Mac.
Still, I would have expected more clue from Google. Mac OS X may be only a small percentage of the PC installed base, but it’s a HUGE percentage of the installed base of leading-edge developers. At O’Reilly conferences, Macs outnumber PCs by a huge margin, as much as 3 or 4 to 1.