It seems that the world of Java on Mac is always full of drama and gnashing of teeth and Chris Adamson has just the article to really kick it into full gear: Mustang for Mac PPC… any point now?

Sadly, I’m inclined to believe that Chris may well be right – the Java 1.6 release for PPC is likely to be a less than wonderful release as Apple focuses it’s efforts on the Intel release. It’s a given that the Intel release will be better than the PPC release just due to the fact that they now get all Sun’s optimizations for free.

The good news for Mac Java developers is that this means that Java on Intel Mac is going to be pretty awesome. Apple can now devote most of their development time to polishing the Mac specific features and optimizing the OS specific bottle-necks. The Java 1.5 release on Intel is already a lot more comparable to performance of Java on Windows – partly from the optimizations they get from Sun and partly just because of the faster chips. Overall, I’m really looking forward to seeing what Apple’s Mustang release is like – I expect it to be pretty impressive, and that makes a nice change when talking about Apple’s Java releases.