Apple has posted Java 5 Release 4 for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) through Software Update. This is a maintenance update on Sun's J2SE 1.5.0_06. Most importantly "After installing J2SE 5.0 Release 4, J2SE 5.0 becomes preferred over Java 1.4.2, which will still be installed on your Mac. Applications run with J2SE 5.0 unless they specifically request Java 1.4.2." This release is now compatible with the Intel Macs, and enables native Quartz rendering by default.
Apple has also posted a tech note on JNI Development on Mac OS X. The most surp[rising thing about thisn note was that Apple still hasn't gotten the message that hiding text in images is uncool. It's even like they're doing any6thing in the text on those pages that couldn't easily eb done with CSS, or even a FONT tag.