Much hand-wringing from Google's chief Java architect Josh Bloch spent a good chunk of a speech at Red Hat's Middleware 2020 conference wailing about Java's last few years drifting along. It's a speech that made quite a splash, for obvious reasons, and contains many familiar gripes about the platform: new releases are taking too long to come out; the JCP's future is murky.

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One of the fun things about writing a blog is seeing a wide range of news sources churn stories out based on the same kernel of information. Thus, I eagerly scoured the tech press to find out more information about James Gosling's resignation from Oracle, which apparently happened more than a week ago but only became public late Friday. All of them without fail were based on Gosling's blog entry, and all of them without fail included this quote, the juiciest:

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You'll have to forgive me: it's actually Tech Pundit law that I work some kind of iPad reference into my blog this week. So, that iPad, huh? Pretty cool! And totally devoid of Java, obviously, like the rest of the iPhone OS platform. Does this mean that Java is soon to be pushed out of mobile, forever?

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I've always been sort of fascinated by what the word "cool" could possibly mean when it comes to programmers and programming languages. After all, brief turn-of-the-millennium dot-com boomster fascination exception, computer programers as a class have largely managed to avoid being tarred as "cool" by society at large. Nevertheless, we never fully escape the social hierarchies established in high school, and thus even within the geeky subculture of computer pros certain structures of coolness emerge.

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So it turns out that when suggest that a company's product might be a scam, you get their attention! My blog post from last week on J2Android, a new tool from the Myriad Group that turns MIDlets into Android apps, resulted in a pleasant conversation I had today with Myriad CTO Benoit Schillings.

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More points of interest from last week's Oracle woo-pitching at EclipseCon! You might recall that in 2008 Tim Bray (who, by the way, recently turned down an offer to stay with Oracle in order to jump ship to Google and work on Android) announced that Java was no longer the darling of the cool kids.

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Oracle is sending its mid-to-upper-level folks out on a charm offensive to convince Java developers of their good intentions. Last week it was James Gosling at The ServerSide's confab; this week, at EclipseCon, a pair of VPs, Steve Harris and former Sunnie Jeet Kaul, were touting Oracle's various commitments to the platform.

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The connection between Android and the Java platform isn't exactly in your face all the time, but it isn't exactly a secret, either. If you're reading this blog, you almost certainly know, already, but: Android applications are for the most part written in Java SE and compiled to bytecode to run on the Dalvik Virtual Machine, which is a modified JVM. There are tweaks you have to make to your Java code to get it to run on Android, but that's frankly true of just about any platform you can make if you want to make your Java experience a seamless one.

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On Monday I talked about Simon Phipps, a Sun C-level officer who left Oracle for other things, signaling at the very least a difference in opinion on how things were and will be going between Phipps and his employers. (For hint of that, see the brief comment on that post that purports to be from Phipps, hinting that the full story of the Apache-Sun dispute has yet to be written.) James Gosling, on the other hand, appeared today at the ServerSide Java symposium in Las Vegas; as befitted Oracle's newly minted CTO of client software, he offered what seemed like a full-throated endorsement of Oracle's future management of the platform, though perhaps with a few off-script asides. You can find good coverage of his talk at eWeek and InfoWorld, along with a brief interview in which InfoWorld's Paul Krill ambushed Gosling in line at his hotel.

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Among the many high-level Sun people leaving the merged Oracle-Sun conglomerate is Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps, who announced his departure on his blog last week. (Side note: Is Chief X Officer the new Vice President? They sure seem to be proliferating!) It was the sort of expected combo of pride and wistful regrets, and (as is probably the intent) it's not that easy to tell whether he's leaving voluntarily or not.

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SpringSource's tc Server got a bit of notice here a year ago when it came out, mostly in the context of its lightweightness. The server is based on Tomcat, and just as the Spring Framework is supposed to sort of be like Java EE, but without all the annoying heavyweight crud that makes Java EE living hell to work with, so too is tc Server supposed to be like a Java EE app server, except without all the annoying heavyweight crud that makes Java EE servers living hell to work with.

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Paul Murphy's one of those tech writers who's been around the industry forever, and while I don't always agree with him, I do find a lot of what he says thought-provoking. On Saturday he posted an interesting and kind of grim take on Java's place in the software ecosystem. If I can sum it up quickly, it goes something like this: Java's greatest advantage, historically, was that its virtual machine shielded developers from the irritating shifts at the OS level, mostly from Microsoft.

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Get it? Because it's a pun, and it's about pluggable modules, and ... erm. Anyway, whereas once long ago there was debate over how exactly the OSGi frameworks would end up implemented in the Java language, that debate is more or less settled, and now the benefits are being quietly reaped. One of the bigger bits of OSGi-related news in the past few months is the new support in NetBeans, announced last month.

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As you may or may not have heard, Oracle has announced its JVM strategy, or at least part of it. Action is needed because the post-merger company has one of those problems that you sort of want to have, in that it now owns two highly regarded JVMs: JRockit, which came along with the BEA acquisition in 2008, and HotSpot, which had been Sun's. Say what you will about Oracle, but they don't necessarily fall prey to "not invented here" syndrome, and are generally open to using acquired technology if it betters something already in their portfolio.

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Today Pocketgamer put up a piece about all the Android phones being trotted out at the Mobile World Congress. Of course, how you feel about Android as a Java developer has a lot to do with what you feel that the relationship between Java and Android is and should be, but the title, "The new Java", certainly jumped out at me. Only author Ben Griffin didn't mean it in a good way:

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