Well, the day we’ve been waiting for has finally arrived: Apple released its long-awaited tablet computer! Oh, wait, wrong blog. No, Sun has finally ceased to exist as a separate entity (at least in the US and Europe) and Java is firmly in Oracle’s hands. Reactions across the Internet to Oracle’s media blitz are legion; I’ve tried to distill some succint information from a couple InfoWorld articles, from CNet, eWeek, and JavaLobby, along with Savio Rodrigues. Oracle wants to emphasize that everything with Java will be “business as usual.” Except that it will be profitable. Larry Ellison said, “There’s a lot of money to be made in the Java middleware space. Our next-generation Fusion applications are based entirely on Java. What you charge and what you give away isn’t as important. We already know how to make money from Java.” Oracle wants to pour resources into JavaFX — it has RIA plans for its own products that JavaFX will be the cornerstone of. It also wants to tie JavaFX, Java, and JavaScript together more tightly (which may mean changes to the still-fluid JavaFX platform). Oracle wants to merge, or at least tie more closely together, Java SE and ME, to achieve real a right once, run anywhere platform, at least on the low end. Ah, the eternal dream! HotSpot and JRocket will eventually be merged into a single JVM. JavaOne will live on as a theoretically separate institution, but will be moved to September and take place at the same time and same place as Oracle OpenWorld, and will focus on the development community rather than on vendors. Glassfish will survive as a “departmental” (read: low end) app server, and Oracle will continue to sell support for it. Presumably its main importance will be that it’s the Java EE reference implementation. WebLogic continues to be Oracle’s main commercial app server, and ideas will be shared between the two projects. NetBeans will still be offered as Oracle’s “open source” IDE, though it will not receive the love that JDeveloper will. It may be spared the axe primarily becase it’s the primary JavaFX IDE, and once JDeveloper and/or Eclipse gain JavaFX extensions, NetBeans will be quietly retired. Oracle wants to make the JCP “more participatory.” The first test of that will come when Oracle doesn’t get its way on something. It all sounds very promising, but as noted in that last bullet point, the proof of behavior comes when people start actually behaving, and everyone will be watching pretty carefully in the coming months to understand the flavor of how Oracle is going to run things. As JBoss CTO Mark Little put charmingly if confusingly put it, “We don’t know what we don’t know, which is what I’ve been saying for weeks.” Technology Industry