There's nothing like a big, steaming hot cup of java to clear away the cobwebs and get you started in the morning, right? Except that when it comes to Java on the Macintosh, we've long suspected that the software merchants had sold us decaf instead. Back when Java was new and exciting, Netscape supported Sun's write-once-run-anywhere cross-platform programming language in the PC and Unix versions of its web browser, but it was nowhere to be found in the Mac version. And once we finally did get Java running on the Mac, it didn't so much run as, well, crawl. We remember how excited we were when the first Java-enabled version of Mac Netscape was released; we fired up the browser, surfed to a Java-enhanced site-- and promptly watched the entire system slow to a sloth's pace all for the sake of an animated banner that, frankly, would have been more appropriate as an animated GIF anyway. This is what all the hype was about?

And while both the real-world uses of Java and the performance of Java on the Mac may have advanced over the last few years, one thing has always been more or less true: Java performance on the Mac has, to put it in the nicest possible light, sucked. With no fewer than three widely-available Java Virtual Machines for the Mac-- Netscape's, Microsoft's, and Apple's own-- running a standard applet in the fastest of the three makes a G3 feel like an '030, while a lowly Pentium running Windows hardly breaks a sweat. That's not exactly a demonstration that shows the blistering performance of the PowerPC chip. And these days the number of JVM's is dropping quickly; Netscape announced that they were ceasing development of their own implementation of Java for their Navigator web browser, and more recently Microsoft said they were jettisoning Mac Java as well. That leaves Apple's Mac OS Runtime for Java. And that might not be a particularly enviable situation, if not for the fact that Apple just issued a press release announcing that MRJ 2.1 is now available for free download.

Due to the inclusion of Symantec's Just-In-Time compiler, version 2.1 of Apple's JVM is up to five times faster than the previous release, if Apple's marketingspeak can be believed; it's apparently designed to run full-scale Java applications (not just applets) at optimum speeds. In addition, MRJ 2.1 also complies with version 1.1.6 of Sun's JDK spec, and supports both AppleScript and QuickTime. If you want to spruce up Java on your Mac, head on over to the MRJ 2.1 web page and start downloading; this may just mark the beginning of serious Java support on the Mac, and it's a big step towards Steve Jobs' promise to make the Macintosh the best Java platform hands down. Now all we need is a version of Navigator that will use Apple's JVM instead of Netscape's decidedly anemic version. (Yes, we know that Internet Explorer will let us use the MRJ virtual machine, but Navigator is our "browser of choice.")