"We Are All One" is the optimistic title of an Oracle Technical Network post on the merger on developers.sun.com and java.sun.com into the aforementioned Oracle Technical Network. (Full and probably unnecessary disclosure: I did some freelance editing work for the OTN back in the early '00s.) The article outlines what exactly this means; it's kind of boring, but it's a big job, and, if Oracle isn't going to keep the Sun brand around (and there's no indication that they plan to do so), a necessary one.

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Is Google fracturing Java, or saving it? I asked those questions, somewhat in jest, a couple of weeks ago. I think the truth is something closer to this: Google is an enormous company that cheerfully allows various business units to chart their own paths, using available tools. For some, Java, conveniently open sourced, is one of those tools. Others are attempting to move beyond it, or even compete with it.

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If you've only got time to read one article about Java today, make Paul Krill's "Java's team of rivals" over at InfoWorld. It nicely encapsulates the broad range of companies other than Sun/Oracle that are advancing the Java platform, sometimes in disparate ways.

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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.

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Do you care about JavaFX? Then you owe it to yourself to read this diatribe from UI engineer Kirill Grouchnikov. It's a nice encapsulation of where JavaFX has been (or tried to be) and where it's going (nowhere fast).

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Last Wednesday's post was about Oracle's choice (or failure to make one) about which of the various IDEs it's created/inherited to support. It's an important issue, but one largely of interest to the relatively small audience of professional developers. So imagine my surprise today when I discovered that the release of a new Java IDE had made the mainstream newspaper of record, the New York Times.

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Those of you who are eager to know which of the two main open source Java based IDEs Oracle would support -- NetBeans, which is a product Oracle has inherited from Sun, or Eclipse, which was originally created and still heavily backed by IBM but has wider market share -- your wait is over. Oracle is choosing both!

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If you've been bummed out by all the negative stuff I've been saying about Java and its future lately, here's one bit of news that might cheer you up just a smidge: Java is still the number one most popular programming language, according to the most recent TIOBE survey.

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My headline from last week -- "Harmony: The only Java SE implementation that matters" -- was obviously meant to be deliberately provocative. Perhaps it would be better to day that it's the only Java SE implementation whose development is having an immediate impact on the day-to-day experiences of those who use it. But one anonymous commenter made an important point: "JEE *depends* on JSE. You could claim JSE-as-something-a-typical-user-cares-about is a flop, but not that JSE as an entity has been a flop."

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I've spent a lot of time here fretting about Oracle's control over Java; but there's actually one way in which Oracle has let the grip slip, just a bit. The Unified Testing Initiative, formerly owned by Oracle, has spun off as an independent organization. The UTI is in charge of the Java Verified program, which really ought to be called the "Java ME Verified" program, because it certifies Java ME apps for deployment to various handsets.

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I will pass away from my obsession with TCK initiatives and field of use requirements to look at an odd little Java project that has been of some interest in the past few weeks: Azul. The name has popped up because of the Managed Runtime Initiative, which the company has been backing. The initiative is an umbrella for a number of projects that seek to integrate managed runtimes (like Java or .Net) more tightly into the various layers (operating systems, hypervisors, and hardware) that they run on top of.

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Oh, let's continue with my conversation/diatribe from last week, shall we? When last we checked, I was venting about how Oracle's field of use restrictions were keeping Google TV -- which might finally bring Java television, a longtime dream of Sun, to the masses -- from being officially certified as Java. Of course, as an anonymous commentor reminds us, it isn't just sheer pig-headedness behind this move; it's all about dollars and cents (slightly edited):

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In the interests of equal time, I'd like to reproduce here (edited just a bit) a comment from my Monday post. In that post, I basically derided as boring Google's latest enterprise middleware product, and as might be expected I got pushback from an anonymous commentor:

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Man, when I was waiting all that time for Oracle to have its merger with Sun approved, I sort of was expecting exciting new things to emerge in the world of Java once it was all over. I can't really say that Oracle has done much with Sun since the merger has completed, except fire a bunch of people and flip-flop for the worse on the TCK issue with the ASF.

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So apparently Oracle and the Apache Software Foundation have been talking all along about a potential resolution of the long-running dispute over test compatibility kits (TCKs), a dispute that has kept Apache Harmony, a perfectly nice implementation of Java, from actually being certified as Java. This important, among other reasons, because Harmony is the basis for the Android OS's Java environment.

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