More points of interest from last week’s Oracle woo-pitching at EclipseCon! You might recall that in 2008 Tim Bray (who, by the way, recently turned down an offer to stay with Oracle in order to jump ship to Google and work on Android) announced that Java was no longer the darling of the cool kids. Well, Oracle client software VP Jeet Kaul certainly wants to change that! He views closures, generics, and multi-language support as the key to Java’s return to super-hipness! “I would like to see people with piercings doing Java programming,” he proclaimed, in a statement whose motivation I understand but that kind of makes me cringe.Meanwhile, Oracle VP Steve Harris had intriguing things to say about the Java Community Process: it needs to “move faster, be more agile, be more flexible”; the JCP structure and community need to “be tweaked and pushed to enable that to happen.” This dovetails interestingly with a recent IDC report on Oracle and Java, which says that Oracle has a chance to clean up the poor relationship Sun had with the Java community, towards the end.The same IDC report puts into stark contrast Oracle and Sun’s needs and interests when it comes to Java: IDC believes that Oracle’s new strategic initiatives in middleware and applications are more dependent on the viability of Java than was Sun Microsystems’ strategy prior to the acquisition, which primarily leveraged Java for mindshare and goodwill in the hope of selling more servers and storage.If there’s anything that we should have learned in the first dot-com bust, it’s that “mindshare and goodwill” do not form the basis of a business, which is why proclamations about the desired fashion tastes of Java developers are perhaps a sideshow. Oracle will nevertheless have a financial incentive to make Java better, which hopefully will translate into a specific kind of goodwill — one that gets more people writing Java code, pierced or otherwise. Technology Industry