Apple has already dropped the support of Java for desktop development but Java can still be used on Macs for server-side applications. Leopard will be bundled with Java, Ruby, Python and PHP.

Sun has made terrible mistakes. They were too slow in giving support to the community and OS vendors. Now that Java has been open sourced it will sure be more easy to integrate within the core services of an OS (Linux or OS X). But I’m afraid it’s too late. Microsoft has .NET and Apple has Objective-C 2.0 (featuring dynamic runtime and garbage collection) — good enough for most developers and perfectly integrated with the OS.

As far as Leopard release is concerned, debugging an OS is terrible and Apple had to port a lot of core apps to take advantages of Leopard unique features. I’m not that surprised and I’d rather wait for a great release. I trust Apple in that regard.

– is not 100%-compatible with its OSX counter-part, e.g. in its current state, it can’t display Gmail’s “Compose Mail” button (but it does on OSX)

– just looks strange on Windows, thanks to its custom TTF fonts & uncoherent GUI

– crashes on my PC machine when accessing basic features (managing bookmarks..)

– has no market (IE, Opera, Firefox are the leaders and here to stay) excepted developers in search of Apple compatibility with iPhone/OSX’s Safari

Seriously, I just can’t understand such a move. It does not make any sense to me.

What next ? iChat ? other iApps ? .. damn, it sucks.

Are we gonna have the alphageeks (mostly Mac zealots) moving away from Java just like what is happening with Microsoft as a result ? What do you think Fred ?

And : any reason why Leopard is postponed yet again ?