Apple and Oracle long ago announced that Oracle would be taking over work on Java for Mac OS X, following Snow Leopard. The OpenJDK Project for Mac OS X was formed, with the intention of offering Oracle’s JRE and JDK for both Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7.

Unfortunately, Lion appears to be progressing much faster than OpenJDK for Mac OS X. Apple just announced Lion will ship next month…

… But OpenJDK has much more work ahead at this point. It does not appear likely at all that OpenJDK will even hit alpha-grade release quality by July, and I doubt a release will even be available within three months following Lion’s release.

Some hackers will probably find a way to cobble together the Snow Leopard binaries and execute them on Lion. For those that want to play it safe though, my suggestion is to partition your drive and install a second copy of Snow Leopard.

Best of all, you can do that right now, so that when Lion ships, Java can be just a reboot away.