While we all wait for the Sun-Oracle merger to wind its way to a close (by January, maybe?), let's pause to acknowledge what should be kind of big Java news: the advent of the Java Store, which should be open to shoppers "in the next week or so"! And if you're wondering about the selection, know that the number of apps on the shelves is already ... approaching 50!

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In the light of the delayed Sun-Oracle merger (and see the New York Times Dealbook blog for a brutal analysis of how the deal was structured to put Sun in a poor position in case of just such delays), there's been a lot of anxiety about Java's future. With the companies unable to really comment on future plans, of course, this has led to anxious seizing on any little tidbit to guide the way.

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So in case you've (a) been under a rock and (b) have difficulty recognizing sarcasm, that headline is sarcastic. The Oracle-Sun merger is, in fact, not going well. Let's review all the ways it didn't go well this week!

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It's no secret that large, unwieldy products tend to get larger and less wieldy over time. It's not anybody's fault, really; it's just that large, unwieldy products have huge user bases, all of whom use it for somewhat different things, all of whom pay good money for it, all of whom want their needs met and their use cases improved. Then one day everyone wakes up and realizes the thing is a mess, and start looking for something easier to use.

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"Dogfooding" is a verb that derives from the phrase "eat your own dog food" -- which, in IT circles, means using the products you sell internally. A rather famous example was Microsoft's moves to shift the infrastructure behind its Hotmail service from BSD to Windows servers.

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Oracle used the opportunity of its recent OpenWorld conference to proclaim that it has nothing but good things in mind for Sun once the EU finally relents and allows the merger to go through. Some highlights:

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To hear The Register tell it, Sun execs were very much taken aback by the spanner thrown into the Sun-Oracle merger works, thus extending the twilight period in which Sun spins its wheels waiting to be absorbed into Oracle and the products it sells and develops to be integrated into Oracle's roadmap.

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At the Adobe MAX conference/dog-and-pony show, Adobe revealed with much fanfare Flash Player 10.1. Why should this be of interest to the world of Java? Well, once 10.1 becomes something other than vapor sometime in 2010, it will run not only on desktop browsers, but on most major smartphones as well. And we're not talking about some sort of stripped-down mobile version; Flash 10.1 will be full-on flash, running on palm-sized devices.

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So here's a thing that everyone thought was going to be in Java 7 and now isn't -- the Swing Application Framework (which in January I called a JSR to watch in 2009, whoops). Work on it hasn't progressed, now it's being pushed back to Java 8 maybe, etc. It wasn't really a core bit of the language, though it would have given heart to those worried that Sun was done with Swing.

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If, like me, you have a Google Alert for "Java" in your RSS reader, you'd know that today's big news was the release of the latest version of the Sun Java Communications Suite. If, unlike me, you don't pay attention to the minutia of the Java ecosystem, you might think that this is an exciting communications product based somehow on Sun's flagship Java technology.

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This week a story bounced around in the lower levels of the Java Web press about a new mobile development "solution" from RealNetworks. Tellingly, very few of the stories had any details not found in the RealNetworks press release, which describes the EMERGE "development platform" as a tool that will port your mobile game to all the cool mobile platforms, including Java ME and, of course, the iPhone and Android.

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With Google jumping on board the polyglottism bandwagon, surely this is an idea that's arrived, right?

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Has it really been a year since the first JVM language summit? The second one is underway right now, and who made the biggest splash but the biggest gorilla in the tech industry, Google? The search giant has unleashed its own JVM language, called Noop.

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Let me be blunt: Java ME is not the cutting edge of mobile application development. It's always had the problem of being divided up into various almost-compatible profiles and varieties, so that its great advantage -- "write once, run anywhere" -- was diluted to "write once, tweak endlessly," and if you're already going through all that trouble, well, why not write native apps that actually look like it belongs on the platform they're running on?

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Oh, Sun and Oracle isn't the only merger story to be obsessed with. How about the intriguing VMware-SpringSource tie-up, which has the advantage of not being a mired in regulatory hell, forever? The recently concluded VMworld conference brought some interesting insight into the nature of the future company, with this quote from SpringSource's always-quotable Rod Johnson:

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