Only four days, until Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard launches and it still has not been confirmed that Java 6 will be part of the latest Mac OS distribution. In fact, chances are, it won't.
Take for instance James Gosling's recent blog entry, where he proudly tells us that he no longer uses a Mac laptop and that the Solaris folks have made 'huge' strides in Solaris's usability on a laptop. However, his reason for dismissing his Mac is manly that the Mac hasn't been keeping up as a developer's machine.

OK, you may think that the timing of his blog post is just a coincidence, anyway, James is right. Java JDK 6 is available for Windows and Linux for many, many months now but it still isn't on the Mac; and while someone responded that a beta of JDK 6 is available at http://developer.apple.com/, it is rumored that this isn't the case anymore and that the Java 6 developer preview has been removed.
I'm a purposely vague here, since the last time I wrote something related, an almost immediate phone call from a company in Cupertino, had me edit (cripple) my article severely...

It is also 'rumored' that the latest beta of OS X 10.5 Leopard, which was made available to developers about four weeks ago, did not include Java 6 but shipped with Java 5 installed instead.

Mac OS X is arguably predominately used on client computers, which is not the place where Java has a great success story to tell and besides selling MacBooks and MacBook Pros to Java Developers, there may not be a reason for Apple to further invest in maintaining a Java VM and JDK.

So there is some indication that Java Developers on the Mac (which includes yours truly) may be up for a big surprise on Friday, when the next big cat purrs; and while there is still hope, why not hypothetically try to answer that question, 'What would you as a Java Developer on the Mac do, if Java 6 never arrived?'