I will pass away from my obsession with TCK initiatives and field of use requirements to look at an odd little Java project that has been of some interest in the past few weeks: Azul. The name has popped up because of the Managed Runtime Initiative, which the company has been backing. The initiative is an umbrella for a number of projects that seek to integrate managed runtimes (like Java or .Net) more tightly into the various layers (operating systems, hypervisors, and hardware) that they run on top of. The Managed Runtime Initiative in turn has gotten attention thanks to the fact that it earned an endorsement from James Gosling, despite the fact Azul and Sun were locked in a patent-related fight several years ago.Azul’s commercial schtick is an interesting take on Java: rather than trying to get a JVM running on your general-purpose server or PC in some sort of efficient way, they just build exquisitely tuned hardware appliances that do nothing but run a JVM on a ludicrous number of cores. Your servers invoke these JVMpliances remotely, with the extremely high performance presumably making up for the necessity to run this stuff on the network. It’s a weird twist on Java, which was originally intended to run on any sort of equipment and not need specialized hardware; still, I’ve sort of stopped trying to peg these sorts of things on some sort of “this is where write once, run anywhere” is going narrative. I think the flexibility of the JVM allows for a lot of different niches to be occupied.And what else is James Gosling up to? Well, in addition to scuba diving, he’s also talking smack about Oracle on his blog, particularly about the exodus of Sun folk from the merged company. “Pretty soon, all Larry will have left is an IP portfolio. Perhaps that’s all he wanted: there’s precious little evidence that he was interested in any of the people.” Ouch! Software Development