Most of the Java loving world has probably already upgraded to OS X 10.5 which has an official, Apple sanctioned Java 6 implementation available.  However, some of you might be stuck on 10.4 for whatever reason (as I was until today...) and are desperate for some Java 6 love.  When doing some work just this morning on gfv3, I finally ran into a Java 6 only reference that I couldn't get around.  After some flailing and whining, I was reminded of soylatte (a colleague here at sun has been using it) which is built off the openjdk sources.

I grabbed that 10.4 build and extracted it and gave it a spin.  If you're a *nix-head like myself, configuring your shell to use soylatte is a trivial process.  Despite my best efforts, however, I failed to find a way to configure OS X to use soylatte in general rather than Apple's 1.5 VM.  So I had to resort to running IntelliJ IDEA on 1.5 but I could register soylatte as a platform VM inside IDEA and run my apps using that.  And that seemed to work quite well.  I can verify that gfv3 does indeed run on soylatte and that makes me very happy.  It made me happy for about 30 minutes until the UPS man showed up with my OS X upgrade DVD with which I could upgrade and get a formal release instead.  But it was an interesting exercise and hopefully anyone else stuck on 10.4 can use this hint as well.  It certainly would've made staying on 10.4 for a longer period much more palatable.