A funny thing happened yesterday: Jonathan Schwartz offered on his blog a preview of something called Project Vector, which will soon be known as the Java Store. The quick version goes something like this: You know how first Google and then Microsoft had browser search toolbars distributed via the Java runtime? Well, soon anyone with a Java or JavaFX app will be able to do the same. Details will have to wait for JavaOne, but Schwartz talks about a “storefront,” so it’s not unreasonable to visualize this as something like the App Store that Apple makes available on its iPhone (and which other mobile providers have been working to imitate).This strikes me as potentially a Very Big Deal, a way to keep Java developers in the fold by offering a unique channel for selling Java apps. It could empower smaller developers and make Java apps on the desktop the reality that Sun’s always dreamed about, simply by making them impulse-buy easy for users to get. And from the tone of Schwartz’s blog post, Sun expects this to be a tidy revenue stream for as well (for Oracle, by the time the store is actually out in the wild).So why has the announcement attracted the attention of practically nobody? A blurb on DZone, a few paragraphs on Dr. Dobbs … and as near as I and Google Blog and News search can tell, that’s just about it. Why has the tech press, always so quick to jump on any idle rumor of potential interest and dissect it, ignored the CEO of a major tech company in a big announcement on that company’s most widespread product? Well, let’s start with the presupposition that Sun (or Oracle) will be making money off of a Java Store like it’s made money off of the search bars. The iPhone App Store, as it turns out, isn’t a huge money-maker for Apple. (Yes, that’s my Apple blog I just linked to; the fact that I also cover Apple-related issues may be why this story interests me so much). As it turns out, the App Store exists to sell more iPhones — or, specifically, to create the economic conditions necessary to get people to write iPhone apps that make people want to buy the iPhone. Unless the economics of the Java Store will be very different from the App Store (Schwartz does mention that developers will be able to “bid for position on our storefront,” which presumably involves paying money to Sun), this won’t necessarily be a great money-making scheme.Plus, there’s the fact that the App Store works great for developers because it essentially targets a single platform. Since as we know “write once, run anywhere” is really something of an aspirational slogan rather than a reality, how will the Java Store make sure that your app will run on all the different kinds of platforms on which it will presumably be installed? Will it be desktop only? Windows only? And how will revenue sharing break down? Maybe everyone thinks the whole concept is too complicated to ever really come to fruition.Or maybe there’s a simple explanation: everyone just thinks that Jonathan Schwartz is a lame duck CEO and Oracle doesn’t really have a lot of interest in desktop Java, so this initiative will be stillborn. And maybe that’s all true, but the silence from the press helps fulfill this prophecy. It’s kind of sad to me that what could be a very intriguing project is being ignored while we wait for the real future of Java to arrive. Software Development