With a tip of the hat to Casablanca, I'm shocked--SHOCKED--to read the really rather embarrassing blog entries from folks in the community about the state of Java in Apple's latest OS release (see David Herron's blog for a round up of some).

Please.

It turns out that Swing in Leopard represents a huge leap forward in Apple's commitment to desktop Java. Among the new goodies I've stumbled across are animated triangles in JTrees, the already-mentioned transition to Sun's rendering pipeline (a tough but correct decision reflecting a commitment to cross-platform fidelity), a revised UI for JTabbedPane, improved button rendering behavior, and more.

I suspect as time passes, more improvements will come out and folks will understand just how busy the Apple Java team has been.

So, what, there are some bugs in OS X 10.5.0? They didn't have 1.6 ready out-of-the-chutes? Big deal. Give it time, just like we have with every release of Java since OS X first shipped with Java 1.3. Only now, thanks to Parallels/Fusion, we actually have a great alternative for the impatient.

Kudos, Apple, for a fine release and for all your hard work.

UPDATE: I've elaborated a bit after reading the release notes.