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