I just received a reply from Apple support confirming that there is nothing in their guidelines that prohibits apps that include an embedded Java virtual machine. Therefore, Apple’s regrettable decision to deprecate Java and disallow apps that depend upon it from entry into their new App store is a mere speed bump and not the road block that I had originally believed it to be. So there are a number of strategies for getting Java into the Mac app store: 1. Embed a java runtime environment as part of the application bundle. Currently there are no Mac JVMs that can be distributed which support Swing with the Quartz UI (i.e. graphical Swing apps won’t look native, if you can even get them to work). However Oracle and Apple’s recent announcement that Apple will be donating source code to the OpenJDK project suggests that this will be resolved with Oracle’s release of JDK7 on the Mac. In the mean time it would be possible to embed third party JVM like Soy Latte or IKVM (a .Net implementation of java) and use Rococoa as the UI. 2.** Use GCJ (The GNU Java Compiler)** which can be installed via Mac Ports, in conjunction with Rococoa for the UI to compile your application into a native binary.

Resources

• Mono for Mac Resource: This page shows some resources related to Mono support on the Mac. Why is this relevant? Because Mono is the open source, cross-platform implementation of the .Net framework and it supports IKVM, a fully-functional java virtual machine that runs on Mono. IKVM will allow you to convert your java applications into .exe files that will run on Mono, which can be embedded in your application bundle.
• Example using Rococoa to use Quartz framework from java
• Rococoa GUI Demo : This tutorial shows a short sample of how to use Interface builder to build an interface for your java application using Rococoa.