Today, we announced the beta of our SQL Server 2005 JDBC driver. You can download the driver from the following location: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/downloads/2005/jdbc.mspx
For those of you who use the 2000 JDBC Driver (and yes, I'd love to talk to any of you who do!!!), you will be presently suprised with the new driver. We support JDBC 3.0, integrated authentication, better performance, etc.
The way I think about JDBC is that it's another way to put and get your data into SQL Server regardless of the platform you run on. Of course, you could say the same thing for the web services support in SQL Server 2005. . . .
Download the beta, give it a try and provide feedback.
Tom