If you follow the Java world, you'd have a hard time missing the announcements about Terracotta's BigMemory over the past few days. The module, a part of the open source Ehcache caching library, bypasses the traditional Java garbage collection mechanism and creates its own memory, which can be much bigger (thus the name!) than Java's GC heap.

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Admittedly it's an elaborate exercise in rejiggered expectations, but Java on iOS (the operating system that runs the iPhone, the iPod, and the iPad) sort of became possible last week, or at least a bit more possible than it was before, and at least in theory. Of course, there isn't going to be any Java runtime or VM allowed on Apple's precious iOS -- oh, no, those hopes, which once seemed quite fond, were shot down years ago. But at least Java transcoding to iOS is possible, and that's something, right?

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Mark Reinhold, the Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group, has announced the a delay in the anticipated release of the JDK, by at least a year. In fact, the Java community seems to be faced with two different choices: a two year pushback, to mid-2012, for an all-features-as-promised version of the JDK; or a release in the middle of next year that would exclude Projects Lambda (closures), Jigsaw (modularity), and Coin ("small language changes"), which would instead by rolled into a JDK release for late 2012.

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James Governor over at RedMonk has a nice wrap-up of new and interesting and important projects being backed by Java these days, so as to refute the "Java is dying" meme. I consider this meme to be something of a joke and tend to only deploy it ironically myself, but it is an important part of the Java discourse. The question that ought to arise is: what would a dying platform look like?

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First VMware made SpringSource's flavor of enterprise Java the programming environment for its teamup with Salesforce.com; then Rod Johnson proclaimed that you could build apps in that environment that had little to do with Salesforce.com's core CRM functionality.

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I respect James Gosling in several ways: both as a technical whiz and as a guy who managed to rise pretty far up in a big corporation without losing his soul or sense of idealism. Google may be using its newfound position as bullying victim for PR advantage, but Gosling has as near as I can tell no financial axe to grin in the conflict, and is motivated mostly by his vision for the platform he created. (In fact, if he has Oracle stock left over from his Sun compensation, he may be acting against his own financial self interest.)

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The question of whether you'll be heading to JavaOne is more relevant than ever, now that Oracle's decision to sue Google over Java has so many Java developers roiled up. The spectacle of Larry Ellison giving the keynote speech will certainly be worth the price of admission, not least to see how hostile the audience gets.

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Interesting news from Bloomberg about BlackBerry's rumored BlackPad tablet. According to anonymous sources "familiar with the plans," the new tablet will run not a version of the BlackBerry OS, but a QNX variant. These sources "didn't know the specific reasons for the decision, though one person said it may have been simpler and faster to use QNX because the BlackBerry 6 includes legacy software code from older BlackBerry phones."

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So Oracle has two distinct claims in its lawsuit against Google over Android: copyright violation and patent violation. The copyright claims are extremely vague and its hard to see how they could apply, given that what Java code Android does contain comes from the open source Apache Harmony project. I suppose it's possible that Oracle will make a SCO-like claim that some source code that they owned was open-sourced without their consent, though this seems improbable. More likely this is a "let's throw this in and see if anything sticks" clause.

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Oracle's move to sue Google over Android is, if a surprise, then not a shock. Oracle has a reputation of playing hardball; Android was a direct threat to Oracle's Java ME business. The question is: is this just the first of many lawsuits over technology that Oracle thinks it has a right to? And if so, who's next?

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Usually I update this blog on Mondays and Wednesdays, but obviously there's been a big news story that can't really wait. To read my immediate take, check out the post I wrote on InfoWorld's Tech Watch blog, "Oracle launches scorched-earth fight to profit from Java." More in depth discussion coming next week!

Continuing with our Java tooling theme, we come to a couple of developments from Oracle on IDEs. The higher-profile one is the release of the Oracle Enterprise Pack, a free set of plug-ins for Eclipse. There isn't anything terribly new here, and the motivation is fairly transparent; as the Inquirer dryly puts it, "Oracle is hoping that by giving developers who use Eclipse an easier ride, more will incorporate its Fusion Middleware software into their applications."

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A few weeks ago I discussed Oracle's crowded IDE picture, then noted that Google's new IDE, aimed at non-programmers, made quite a splash. Google seems to be trying to get itself into the "real" tooling market with its acquisition of Instantiations, which, amongst other things, makes a highly regarded GUI designer for the Java-backed Google Web Toolkit.

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The evolution of tech companies over the years and decades is something of interest to me, and Salesforce.com is in the midst of a change that I find particularly intriguing. Born as a CRM service company that happened to offer its functionality over the Internet, it has come to realize that perhaps its greatest asset is the virtualized infrastructure it built to provide those services to customers. The upcoming VMforce team-up with SpringSource is a big jump in that direction.

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The beta version of Tomcat 7 came out last week. This is a Big Deal! Tomcat has been at various times the reference implementation of Java Servlets, and Tomcat 7 now includes support for the latest version of the Servlet spec. Then there's GlassFish -- once Sun's, now Oracle's.

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