BusinessObjects WebIntelligence XI R2 (a Java Applet version of DesktopIntelligence) didn't work with 6.0 until SP3. Since Java loves to auto-update, we had to keep rolling back people's PCs and then telling it not to... Now we have SP3 here, so we can use 6.0. It works properly, and even the 6u10 version works with it. I wish 6.0 hadn't broken so much (I'm sure wouldn't play so fast and loose with Solaris Binary Compatibility) but I do like the speed improvement. nic

it's unstable. JavaDB and the WS stack should NEVER have been included, let alone that embedded http server. It paves the way for the disaster that's going to be 7. 1.5 is fast, rock stable, and the last with an acceptable feature set (though many disagree and consider 1.4 to be the last, if not 1.3). 1.4.2 is also extremely stable and performs quite well. Maybe not so much for Swing applications but when running servers it's quite sufficient. So there is no reason to use 1.6 unless you want to use the stuff that shouldn't be in it in the first place, and you do loose stability. Maybe for clientside applications it doesn't matter if the JVM hangs or crashes after a few hours, but for servers that need to be up essentially 24/7 it's a major problem. Maybe it's gotten better in recent 1.6 JVM releases, but for the ones we tested those stability problems were a major headache. Enough of one that we decided to abandon the work done on the first project intended to rely on 1.6 and redo it in 1.5.

1.6 is 100% compatible with Java 1.5 That is not my experience - our 1.5 Swing application breaks under 1.6.

apple is responsible for the JRE implementation on mac. There are already SE6 builds available for Mac OS X Leopard.