Where did Java 5 go?

Eric | September 3, 2009

Screen shot 2009-09-03 at 13.27.17 Today, when I installed MacOS X Leopard, I was surprised to see that the update had remove Java 5 from the disk! The “1.5” folder now is just a symbolic link to the 1.6 JDK! Where is the sense in that? I guess I am not the only developer who just needs a 1.5 JDK from time to time. I don’t care about the old VM but I do care about the old class libraries. When using Java 6 libraries to develop Java 5 compatible code it can easily happen that one uses APIs that were not available in 1.5. Luckily I had time machine set up, so it was easy to get back the “real JDK”. No wonder they save so much disk space in Snow Leopard …