We have known this was coming for many months now - why is anyone surprised?
The support will revert to JVM vendors where it belongs.
Personally I think it is a good thing - we will get JVM versions much faster than Apple supplied them.
It isn't about being surprised. Apple is still supplying the JVM. At my company, some IT guy sends out an email saying 'don't install Lion cause Java isn't installed and it breaks Network Connect'. It is this kind of unnecessary confusion which doesn't help anyone. My blog post is simply telling people how they can fix their stuff after Apple decides to make things difficult and confusing for people.
When I first launched Xcode after installing Lion, a dialog popped up saying I would need to install Java and relaunch, and gave me a button to press that would do that for me. It worked exactly as advertised -- literally one mouse click. Not at all difficult or confusing, and in fact simpler than the command-line approach your post describes. Other folks I've talked to had the exact same thing happen with apps like Photoshop and Java-dependent games: just one click. Was your experience different?
I didn't find opening up Terminal.app and typing 'java' difficult or confusing either. The rest of the blog post (with the symlinks) is about telling Eclipse where to find the source code.
That said, I think that it sure would be nice if my OS already came with Java. But I use Java every day, so maybe I'm biased.
For those of you who are worried about Apple needing to spend a few of the billions of dollars it has in the bank on paying a couple engineers to maintain security patches, it doesn't have to be the Apple or Oracle one either. OpenJDK would be fine.
Apple was the only vendor that took up Sun's original model of java where each vendor tailored the JVM to their situation. Look at what Microsoft did with that compared to Apple.
I'm a bigger fan of having Oracle deal with the porting since they have a much larger interest in getting java working everywhere well and securely than Apple has in keeping java working on their platform.
