É incrível como as maiores inovações no mundo Java raramente são implementadas pela Sun:

Sun found that by embracing standards over implementations, they spent long hours thrashing out specifications, only to provide instant credibility to other vendors’ products while their own languished. Weblogic stole the EJB early adopter window. A number of small vendors provided servlet implementations before Tomcat was born… which, although written by Sun employees, was an open-source project and yielded no financial benefit. JMS… well, JMS was always the redheaded stepchild of the J2EE family, at least until vendors like Sonic and Fiorano rescued it for the common Java programmer. (Those who’d been using IBM MQSeries all the while never really could see why you’d want to program against JMS APIs instead of IBM’s own.) In each and every case, Sun found their product to be the third or fourth entry into the race, usually years after the others had started, and as a result….

Hoje em dia, com a força com que a microsoft está a tentar aliciar os programadores, a Sun tem de mudar qualquer coisa para conseguir acompanhar os ventos de mudança. E apesar de achar que abrir a VM ao open source pode não ser o melhor (qualquer dia temos tantas versões da Java VM como temos de linux), ainda há projectos interessantes a seguir:

Groovy is like a super version of Java. It can leverage Java’s enterprise capabilities but also has cool productivity features like closures, builders and dynamic typing.

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  • is an agile and dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine
  • builds upon the strengths of Java but has additional power features inspired by languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk
  • makes modern programming features available to Java developers with almost-zero learning curve
  • supports Domain-Specific Languages and other compact syntax so your code becomes easy to read and maintain
  • makes writing shell and build scripts easy with its powerful processing primitives, OO abilities and an Ant DSL
  • increases developer productivity by reducing scaffolding code when developing web, GUI, database or console applications
  • simplifies testing by supporting unit testing and mocking out-of-the-box
  • seamlessly integrates with all existing Java objects and libraries
  • compiles straight to Java bytecode so you can use it anywhere you can use Java

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    Ah…! A nova Silver Bullet do Java!