Tiger (Java 1.5/5) on Tiger (Mac OSX 10.4)

Apple has released Java 1.5 as a manual download with no plans to release J2SE 5.0 for earlier releases of Mac OS X. Which I guess means that they are not going to show up in Software Update for quite some time. Additionally applications requiring J2SE 5.0 / JDK 1.5 must explicitly request version 1.5.

Java 1.5 for Mac OS X is currently based on J2SE 5.0 Update 2 (JDK version 1.5.0_02) - Sun is currently shipping Update 3 for Windows, Linux and Solaris.

Mac OS X 10.4 does allow all 3 (1.3, 1.4, and 1.5) JDK versions to be installed at the same time.

This is kind of a bummer - while I am glad to see that I will be able to code, and run Java 1.5 apps on my Mac - Java 1.5 was released about 9 months ago, and its finally just available as a manual download. This leaves me very curious as to why Apple doesn't want to make Java 1.5 the default JVM on Tiger. Does anyone have any thoughts on that?

See Apple's Java FAQ (link no longer works, but it was developer.apple.com/java/faq/) for more info.