Making Sun Java 1.6 play via PulseAudio

I first tried using the OpenJDK/IcedTea open source java solution.  While this is certainly improving, it simply failed with many of the online games, or, in some cases it would work, but perform slowly or hang after a game or two.  Since these games worked fine with the Sun Java 1.6 I needed a solution for that.  Running java via "padsp" seemed to work from the command line, so my idea was to write a simple wrapper script that would run java with "padsp" transparently.  Here what I came up with:

#!/bin/bash
padsp /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/bin/java.bin "$@"

Basically, I renamed the real java binary to "java.bin" and dropped the above shell script in it's place.  That way running the command "java" actually runs "padsp java" and thus redirects sounds via PulseAudio.  Since it's replacing the binary that the plugin calls it works for the Java plugin as well.  This allows sound from Java applications to play simultaneously with all other PulseAudio capable applications, including current Flash plugins, and applications like VLC.

Obviously the above script would need to be tweaked based on the path that you're java is installed and the version, and you'd need to fix it again each time you upgraded java, but it's the best solution that works with the plugin that I've been able to figure out.  I'd be interested if others have a better solution.  Hopefully Sun Java 1.7 will support PulseAudio or OpenJDK support will continue to improve so that it will work with Java based games more reliably.