Extreme Portability: OpenJDK 7 and GlassFish 3.1.1 on Power Mac G5!
- by MarkH
Occasionally you hear someone grumble about platform support for some portion or combination of the Java product "stack". As you're about to see, this really is not as much of a problem as you might think.
Our friend John Yeary was able to pull off a pretty slick feat with his vintage Power Mac G5. In his words:
Using a build script sent to me by Kurt Miller, build recommendations from Kelly O'Hair, and the great work of the BSD Port team... I created a new build of OpenJDK 7 for my PPC based system using the Zero VM.
The results are fantastic. I can run GlassFish 3.1.1 along with all my enterprise applications.
I recently had the opportunity to pick up an old G5 for little money and passed on it. What would I do with it? At the time, I didn't think it would be more than a space-consuming novelty. Turns out...I could have had some fun and a useful piece of hardware at the same time. Maybe it's time to go bargain-hunting again.
For more information about repurposing classic Apple hardware and learning a few JDK-related tricks in the process, visit John's site for the full article, available here.
All the best,Mark
