In the interests of equal time, I’d like to reproduce here (edited just a bit) a comment from my Monday post. In that post, I basically derided as boring Google’s latest enterprise middleware product, and as might be expected I got pushback from an anonymous commentor:If you don’t appreciate the beauty and power of Fusion Middleware, or are not in working with SOA platforms in some way, I pity you. Getting excited over Java and a possible brave new future? Talk about ZZZZ. Oracle didn’t acquire Sun to push the limits of Java for Java nerds all over the universe! What did you expect? You’re probably the same kind of Java fanboy that would have wined if Oracle actually did do anything major with Java, saying stuff like ‘Why couldn’t they just leave it alone! … oh the community, business as usual!!!” Wahh wahh. Lame. At some stage people need to deliver business value, not fancy new JDK’s and geek goodies. OFMW actually comes close to doing that … and guess what, it’s built on Java, YEY!The core point here — that workaday products are what Java is for, and that middleware will make a lot of people’s lives easier and better, more than some exciting new JDK feature — is well taken. It may be Java is entering a state of stability and maturity. COBOL is a stable, mature, and important language, and millions of lines of COBOL code are still out there running. But COBOL isn’t particularly innovative, or moving into new frontiers. Java could in fact be moving into new frontiers. In a way, it already is, driven by unofficial implementations. This article at the Register is essentially a rehash of the long TCK dispute, but it frames it in terms of Google’s recently announced Google TV platform — which, essentially, is an Android-based television OS. Google TV apps will, more or less, be Java SE apps — but they can’t be officially called that because, thanks to rules that were drawn up a decade ago and were arbitrary even then, Java SE can only run on a “computer,” not a television. (Of course, you connect connect a computer to a television, but let’s not ask the legal implications of that.)If Oracle would just give the official Java blessing to Android, all the innovation that might arise from it would get plowed back into the platform. As it is, it will forever be walled off. It’s more likely to become incompatible with official Java. Sun has been talking about Java on TV for years now; it is ironic that a service that has the potential to really make that a marketable product won’t have the Java name on it.So, yeah, middleware’s important. But so is growth and experimenting with new uses, to the whole health of the platform. After all, who would have though ten years ago that Java SE would eventually be running on phones? Not Sun; that’s why the licensing is written as it is. But putting up those kinds of artificial restrictions is a problem, and they should come down as soon as possible. Technology Industry