Chapter 1. Getting Oriented
Mac OS X is, in many ways, a new paint job on a 30-year-old operating
system. BSD (the Berkeley
Software Distribution), the Unix root of Mac OS X, has been around
since the 1960s. The Mach kernel was developed in the 1990s, and the
underlying user interface was created in early 1980s along with Lisa
(Apple's ill-fated precursor to the Macintosh). In
other words, everything old is new again.
Mac OS X doesn't feel like a 30-year-old clunker,
though, but the culmination of countless hours of experimentation and
refinement in desktop and workstation operating systems. To a Unix
expert, Mac OS X is much like a solid distribution of a classic BSD
system with the most egregiously beautiful window manager
you've ever seen. For the Windows veteran, it is a
simplified beast梐 pure workhorse of modern productivity
stripped of decades of anachronisms and distilled until it has an
almost Zen-like simplicity. For the Mac OS 9 user, it represents an
even more significant change. Nasty crashes and ridiculous extension
conflicts are now a thing of the past, while Aqua, Mac OS
X's new user interface, is clearly the look of the
future.
Most importantly, though, Mac OS X is finally a
developer's platform. With the melding of BSD, a
killer user interface, and unprecedented stability, code can finally
be written on the Mac OS X platform and deployed to Windows, Linux,
Unix, or other Mac OS X servers. This book was written with the Java
developer in mind. It assumes some degree of Java experience and
familiarity with basic
Unix
commands such as cd, ls, and
pwd. Maybe you are interested in porting an
existing Java application to Mac OS X (perhaps because your customers
asked for a Mac OS X version). Or maybe Linux is your development
platform, but you are interested in moving to Mac OS X to access
powerful graphics applications such as Adobe Photoshop. Maybe
you're a bored Windows user, or are philosophically
opposed to the Microsoft hegemony.
Your degree of experience really doesn't matter; Mac
OS X is a great Java development platform for people of all
programming and operating system backgrounds.
|
