I've just installed Panther and since you don't get stuff like CVS installed by default, I decided to open up the XCode CD and install the developer tools. To my surprise there are some Java tools tucked away including Ant, XDoclet, log4j and JBoss. If you install the Java tools, they can be found in :

• Ant 1.5.3, XDoclet 1.2b and log4j 1.2.8 in /Developer/Java/J2EE
• JBoss 3.2.2 (RC2) in /Library/JBoss/3.2

In Apple's inevitable way, running JBoss is as simple as navigating to the bin directory of the JBoss installation and running the run.sh script. No need to even set up environment variables such as JAVA_HOME. Okay, getting JBoss running on any platform is easy, but you have to admire Apple for making it even easier.

I knew that the server editions of Panther were going to include JBoss, but not the normal editions. Of course, you can already get newer versions of the tools yourself, but it's nice to see Apple making this stuff available and pushing Java as one of their development platforms. It just enables people to get up and running quickly, meaning that they can concentrate on learning how to develop applications rather than setting up tools. I wonder if we can convince Microsoft to include J2SE and Tomcat in the next edition of their OS? ;-)