JavaOne: Larry Ellison loves client-side Java SO MUCH

Hey, everybody, remember when Oracle bought Sun, and everyone was all doom and gloom about non-EE Java's prospects because Oracle only wanted Java for its enterprise-scale Orpliances? Well, to hear Larry Ellison tell the tale at JavaOne today, that's just not true! Ellison talked up JavaFX, saying that developers reluctant to use AJAX would prefer it; he even said that OpenOffice libraries should be written in JavaFX, which implies that OpenOffice will continue to exist. (JavaFX 1.2 has been released, by the way, with some backwards incompatibilities with 1.1, because why not.) And perhaps the wackiest notion he floated is of some sort of Java-based netbook. "I don't see why some of those devices shouldn't come from Sun," Ellison said. "There will be computers that are fundamentally based on Java." Ellison also acknowledged that some of these Java-based devices come from Google -- which is fascinating because Google's Android is based around Apache Harmony and thus is not de jure Java (though obviously it runs Java code de facto). Perhaps a sign that Ellison will cut the Gordian knot of the Apache-Sun dispute?

Now, it's true that with the Sun-Oracle deal not closed yet, Ellison is in fact not allowed to talk about radical most-merger changes, so anyone who was expecting him to come onstage and laugh maniacally about killing Java SE was always doomed to disappointment. But the keynote was definitely focused on client-side stuff, not the server. The other major bit was the preview of the Java store, a client-side enterprise if ever there was one. The video in that link is less than impressive to me -- although I am charmed to learn that James Gosling uses a Mac -- though it is interesting that there seems to be the possibility of several different front-ends that can access the same group of apps for sale. In separate (though easy to conflate) news, Verizon launched a Java ME app store for its phones, offering Java developers a direct market to mobile phone users, something that's been needlessly lacking to this point.