Pretty much every tech writer in the universe over the past couple of days has been weighing on how Google's Chrome OS announcement will affect their little corner of the world, and I am certainly not going to be an exception. And I don't feel like I have to leap very far to do it, either. Let's see, a platform that will allow you to more or less ignore the OS and let all your interaction take place over the Internet via the browser?

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If you've been casually following the headlines from the last few weeks as Oracle released the Oracle Fusion 11g middleware suite, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Sun-Oracle union was already paying dividends. "Java development big part of Oracle Fusion strategy" cried Computerworld.

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Android has always held a weirdly ambiguous position in regards to Sun's official Java. On the one hand, applications written for Android are written in Java code, and so the platform's popularity can only help reinforce Java's popularity among developers.

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We've been talking all this time about the Sun-Oracle merger as if it's a done deal, but the US government has the right and the responsibility to examine proposed combinations to make sure they don't violate anti-trust law, and the Obama Administration is rumored to be stricter on this point than the Bush Administration was. Thus, it was not entirely unexpected that Department of Justice put the brakes on the transaction last week.

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Someday, someday soon, the Oracle-Sun deal will close, and we'll have more than just speculation to go on when we talk about what's in the future. But until then, it's kind of fun to watch folks get anxious.

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If you haven't read Java creator James Gosling's two-part Interview with eWeek's Darryl Taft, you really ought to check it out. It's an intriguing look at what this epochal figure in the Java landscape think of the present and future of the language. Part 1 focuses on the current state of the language, and Gosling very much comes across as dedicated to Sun in particular's vision of how the language ought to work in the marketplace.

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I'm going to start off with a comment that Rich Unger left on one of my previous posts, in which I snidely derided Sun's (and Java's) money-making capabilities. Rich said, "As Sun software executives love to point out, Java is one of the only things at Sun that does make money. They license it to small device (e.g. phone) manufacturers, they bundle MS/Yahoo/whatever toolbar with the JRE, and get paid ridiculously too much for that. It's actually profitable." That's fair enough!

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Usually when people discuss the chances that JavaFX will take off (or not) in the marketplace, they see it battling with existing offerings like Adobe's Flash (and its descendants) and Microsoft's Silverlight. But lately there's been a bit of buzz about the possibility that HTML 5 will be able to do most of what those technologies do, including video -- and be completely open and not owned by a major corporation to boot.

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Hey, remember that whole dispute between The Apache Software Foundation and Sun over the Test Compatibility Kits for Apache Harmony, the ASF's Java SE implementation? You might recall back when everyone was sure that IBM would be buying Sun, folks seemed convinced that this boded well for a resolution of the dispute on Apache's terms.

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JavaOne was full of happiness and fun; to read the many blog posts of the folks who were there, you understand why these trade shows are worth it to so many people. There really is a sense of community that comes when you get together with thousands of strangers interesed in the same things you are. And Larry Ellison even showed up to make comforting noises about Java's future!

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Ah, JavaOne, we hardly knew ye! There were any number of interesting and moderately wave-making announcements that came down the pike at Java's big show.

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Hey, everybody, remember when Oracle bought Sun, and everyone was all doom and gloom about non-EE Java's prospects because Oracle only wanted Java for its enterprise-scale Orpliances? Well, to hear Larry Ellison tell the tale at JavaOne today, that's just not true!

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If you believe press releases, Sun has hit all the right notes in its latest revision of the JSR that defines the procedures for the Java Community Process.

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Your faithful Java To Go blogger won't be able to make it to JavaOne next week, which is too bad, because I'd love to gauge the mood of developers on the floor. Presumably the feeling will mainly be of uncertainty: the Sun-Oracle merger won't have closed yet, so there still won't be any definitive guidance on what Oracle-owned Java will look like.

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Well, since my last post the profile for Project Vector has been raised, at least a little bit, which I plan to take credit for, though I probably don't deserve it.

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