Last week Microsoft Watch ran a story entitled Windows Vista: Aero Glass and Java Don't Mix. Chet Haase, Java Client Group Architect at Sun, sets the record straight in a subsequent blog post affirming that Java in fact runs just fine on Vista. Sun has been working with Microsoft on Vista compatibility during the entire Java 6 Mustang development cycle.
In fact, we have been tuned into this release and making Java work on it since it was named after a breed of cattle. Between regular calls with Microsoft, interaction with their engineers when problems or questions arose, and regular testing and engineering during Vista's development, we have been building a rock-solid release of Java for Vista.
Chet does acknowledge that older versions of Java may have issues on Vista. However this is to be expected with a major OS change:
Vista is not just XP++; there are fundamentally new things about the system that makes older software break. Is all software broken? Probably not. But the more of the system an application uses, the more likely it is to run into issues where the system has changed, and need to react to those issues. In our case, Java is not just a simple win32 GUI application; it is a runtime platform with deep rooted needs in the operating system, the networking stack, the security model, the graphics system, ... if any of these change significantly, then we need to change our software in reaction. And in the case of Vista, it has been an ongoing process of learning, testing, debugging, submitting bugs against Microsoft, fixing our bugs, re-testing, .... And since Vista has been a moving platform during the Java SE 6 development process, we've been in this development cycle continually with every new drop of Vista.
Java 6 will be the preferred version of Java for Vista. However, many Vista fixes have been backported to Java 5 with work continuing that will be included in a update slated to be released around January of 2007. Sun also plans to ship a Vista-enabled update to Java 1.4.2 after the Java 5 update.