Last week I asked if Google were fracturing Java, along the lines of Microsoft’s abortive plans to market its own incompatible J++ language in the late ’90s. The result was an outpouring of comments to an extent much beyond this blog’s usual take, almost all of which dismissed my worries; in fact, most seemed to think that Google’s moves with Android and Google App Engine have saved a language that was becoming moribund. “With GWT, GAE, Cloud and Android and everything else that Google is doing it is saving Java from becoming the out-of-fashion enterprise-only language that it was becoming,” said one anonymous commentor.While I won’t disagree with anyone on technical merits, I do have to say that one of the strong undertones of the comments was that Google, even if it isn’t hewing to the letter of Sun’s intentions for the platform, is at least doing something interesting with it. What comes across most is a community hungry for leadership — leadership that it simply wasn’t getting from Sun, and, as near as I can tell, hasn’t been getting from Oracle either. “devdanke” probably went farthest by saying, “I wish Google would’ve bought Sun instead of Oracle getting it. Then Google could clean up the Java mess that Sun left behind.”This, then, is the biggest difference between the J++ crisis and the current situation: back then the nascent Java community was loyal to Sun and saw Microsoft’s efforts as an attack from an enemy. The modern Java community realizes that the platform isn’t going away, but wants it to grow and innovate, and doesn’t much care much who takes the lead on that. I think this is a wake-up call for Oracle, if they truly want to shape the future of the platform. Technology Industry