Fanning out on the JVM

I held off on posting yesterday because rumor had it that the Sun-IBM deal would close today, but it looks like another day has passed without that Godot-like event finally arriving. (Fun fact: When I plugged “sun ibm” into Google, the number one hit was an article from ZDNet entitled “When will IBM buy Sun?” It was published in 2002.) The announcement will really and finally happen next week, supposedly; until then, JVM teams at the two companies continue to taunt each other over performance claims, which should make their seemingly inevitable co-workership all the more awkward.

Meanwhile, I turn an eye to fellow who keeps popping up in this blog, Stephen Colebourne. You might remember him commenting on the Apache-Sun dispute and suggesting that no Java SE 7 standard will ever arrive. DZone had a link on an interesting presentation on Fan, a new language Colebourne is working on. Fan is one of a great number of JVM-compatible languages with a Java-like syntax — but it is unique as far as I know in that it’s also a .Net CLR language. This is the first instance I’ve seen of developers using the JVM’s openness to provide an escape route from the Java ecosystem altogether. If, like Colebourne, you’ve got concerns about the future of Java, well, this is one way to deal with it (though running into the arms of Microsoft hardly seems like a better choice).