One of (several) things I'm cranky about on this blog is JavaFX. Last December I asked if anyone knew of honest-to-goodness production JavaFX apps in the wild; in particular, as I emphasized in a later post, I wanted to know about JavaFX ads that run within a browser windows, as do most apps written in Flash and Silverlight (the technologies against which JavaFX ostensibly competes).

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Hey there, while Oracle was worming Java's way onto feature phones, there was a big announcement from a consortium of handset makers and wireless carriers about something called the Wholesale Applications Community, which will provide a means by which developers can write and sell wireless applications across multiple vendors.

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If you're like me and you have a Google News alert set up to deliver all Java-related news to your RSS reader, you probably saw several variations on this press release, which proudly proclaims that "Qualcomm and Oracle Pre-integrate Oracle's Sun Java Wireless Client on Brew Mobile Platform Operating System." That's a lot of baffling trademarks for one headline!

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There was a fun and wholly civil little mini-blog debate between Twitter's Nick Kalen and the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group's Roman Roelofsen this week. Kalen started it with a post called Why I Love Everything You Hate About Java, and Roelofsen responded with Why I hate everything you love about Java.

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Oracle is now wholly in charge of Java -- but there's no shortage of people who have suggestions for what they should do with it! To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, the experience is no doubt akin to being nibbled to death by tiny chicks. Oracle is a company that's used to doing what it wants when it decides to do it, but Java really is a community, so there's bound to be input.

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Well, with Oracle having been in control of Java for a week or so, now, and Sun's former CEO quitting via Tweet haiku, we can start to take stock a little of the future of the Java platform. This JavaLobby roundup for JCP member reactions is intriguing just for its sheer hopefulness about the future of that crucial aspect of the Java community.

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In my last post, I made a little joke about the closing of the Sun-Oracle deal being overshadowed by Apple's big iPad announcement. The folks at Oracle would almost certainly have preferred that their deal closed perhaps a few days earlier or later, so they wouldn't have to compete with the Apple marketing juggernaut. The two presentations were aimed at wildly different audiences; but still, there were important (and possibly troubling) hints at Java's future hidden in Apple's messaging.

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Well, the day we've been waiting for has finally arrived: Apple released its long-awaited tablet computer! Oh, wait, wrong blog. No, Sun has finally ceased to exist as a separate entity (at least in the US and Europe) and Java is firmly in Oracle's hands.

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As Sun passes gently into that good night, a couple of interesting articles chronicle the moment of transition. The Register has a mildly jaundiced look back at Jonathan Schwartz's history with the company. Schwartz's rise paralleled the rise of software within a company that had really always been a hardware company.

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All this time we've spent in limbo awaiting the EU's OK on the Oracle-Sun merger -- the OK that officially arrived this week -- the frustrating assumption for Java fans has been that the hold-up wasn't even related to Java, though it would have a huge effect on the platform. The EU's official press release approving the merger doesn't necessarily belie that impression, with much of the up-front matter focusing on the MySQL drama.

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Last month the promised head-on collision between Oracle and the European Commission ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. This means in all likelihood that the EU will give its seal of approval to the Oracle-Sun merger quite soon -- perhaps as early as Wednesday, January 20 -- and almost certainly by the review deadline of January 27, which means that the merger will finally be complete in February at some point.

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I've talked here before about SpringSource, which is interesting to me primarly because of what it represents a reaction to: namely that Java Enterprise Edition code is hard, and complex, and difficult to get right, and so of course if someone says "We can do most of what Java EE can do only a lot easier," you'd find plenty of people who'd jump at the chance to try it out. There are other ways to deal with the complexity, of course.

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One of the many ways that JavaFX was supposed to change the world of Java forever: it was supposed to supply a unifying method for creating slick mobile UIs with Java. That's been one of the technology's less fulfilled promises (does anyone know of any mobile JavaFX apps out there in the wild?). Instead, Java mobile development in practice remains spread out over various quasi-compatible silos.

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Some years ago I did some behind-the-scenes editing for a tech site that published a lot of Java how-tos, and they were real sticklers about the conforming to Sun's trademark diktats, no matter how asinine I or the other editors found them. Chief among these rules: Java must never be used as a noun, only as an adjective modifying other.

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Earlier this month, I put up a somewhat grouchy post about JavaFX, or at least about my experience with one JavaFX app -- specifically, in the weird and wonky way in which I had to download and install it. I asked about others' experiences with better-run apps, and got a couple of interesting anonymous responses in the comments section. The first, under the heading "Ha ha, silly post," was as follows:

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