There was a small burst of interest in the Java press last week about a survey conducted by Jaspersoft of developers who use Java and MySQL. The survey sought to see how those developers felt about the future of those two open source technologies under Oracle’s guiding hands. (You can read the takes at CNET, ZDNet, and ADT.) The articles focused more on MySQL than Java (not least because the transition of control of MySQL was much more contentious), but the response from developers was generally positive, and that was the takeaway that most journalists had from the piece — “developers like Oracle-controlled Java and MySQL just fine.”In fact, the evidence for this is pretty thin. If you read the executive summary of the survey itself (you can download it as a PDF from Jaspersoft), you’ll see there are only two Java-related questions: “Under Oracle stewardship, will the Java Community Process most likely improve, stay the same, or get worse?” (40 percent said improve, 40 percent said stay the same, and 20 percent said get worse); and “Under Oracle stewardship, will your use of Java likely increase, stay the same, or decrease?” (25 percent said increase, 70 percent said stay the same, and 5 percent said decrease).Jaspersoft’s interpretation of these numbers seem somewhat rosy to me; for instance, concerning developers’ future plans to to use Java, they said, “This result belies the common perception that modern scripting languages have eclipsed Java. It suggests a resurgence of Java in the enterprise under Oracle stewardship. This is goods news to millions of Java developers and for enterprises with substantial investments in applications.” “Resurgence” certainly seems like a strong word to describe survey results that show that three-quarters of developers have no plans to increase their use of the language. As for the opinion of Oracle’s treatment of the JCP, 60 percent of people think it will stay at about the same level of quality or even get worse, with is troubling considering how many people are frustrated by it. If I were given these tea leaves to read, I’d have to say that they represent a holding pattern. Without much information to go on, people aren’t making big plans to change their Java usage one way or another; and without knowledge of what exactly Oracle is going to do with the JCP, people are allowing their natural pessimism or optimism free rein. Technology Industry