Oracle's Effect on Java

With Oracle just after buying Sun, maybe it's time to consider what this means for the Java community. There's no doubt that enterprise Java is something that Oracle have huge interest in, and will probably help nudge this along. Two things that I would really like to see are continued, and improved, investment into Java on the client side, as well as getting things back on track for Java 7. 

In our previous post on the Oracle acquisition, Alex Miller pointed out that the JCP will now be dominated by two superpowers, each with very strong business motivations to control and influence the future of Java.  Obviously Oracle has the upper hand by controlling the JCP and the Java spec. He elaborates further on the point in his latest blog entry, where he says that while it would be nice of Oracle to give up the controlling seat in favour of a more democratic aproach, it's doubtful that it would happen. 

Another fantastic point made by Alex in his post was that we will now see the the team behind JRockit, a JVM implementation from Oracle that I had forgotten about,  and the core Sun VM team possibly getting together and giving us an even better JVM implementation. 

What I'm looking forward to seeing now is what this means for me, a Java developer. Depending on how this whole acquisition works out, we should be seeing new faces and fresh ideas for Java in general.

What do you think this means for the current line of Sun products, in particular:

• Glassfish
• MySQL
• Netbeans
• OpenSolaris
• JavaFX

 We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Additionally, to help round out the shock and awe of this morning's news, we've assembled a list of news coverage and Tweets from around the Web.