Larry Ellison Prostitutes Java?

I just saw a tweet from a character called Zed Shaw. Zed is a colorful guy, and a man of determined opinions. If he thinks something is wrong he will say so, most likely dropping f-bombs freely in the process.

His first tweet was rapidly followed by another.

Thinking about it, I cannot remember installing any other language and have it dick around with the settings on some other application.

I thought possibly Zed had caught the toolbar from somewhere else (I came within an inch of simply throwing WinAmp away when it intruded on my browser's search facilities in a similar way), but sure enough there's a (sadly undated) article at java.com entitled How do I unistall the Yahoo! toolbar from Firefox?, a clear enough indication to me that Java is likely responsible for Zed's woes.The FAQ explains about not just the Yahoo! toolbar but also the Bing and Google toolbars, but it appears that only the first two are installed by Java.

I suppose I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this behavior is new since the Sun empire was assimilated into the hive-mind by the Oracle collective. The fact that you can deselect the install options is neither here nor there. The real question is, what's the strategy behind this change? I can hardly believe that any revenues this hare-brained scheme might bring in are of the slightest significance to the world's second largest software company. But why would the company that effectively owns Java (in so far as anyone can own a language) deliberately try to discredit it in this way?

We can only speculate. Let's make it interesting ...

Google Wave: A Reason to Learn Java?

I've just (finally!) finished viewing the developer preview video of Google's Wave project from the recent Google I/O gathering. If I had time I would be brushing up my Java right now. I understand that the Java world was somewhat upset that Google App Engine supported only Python as a programming language for so long. Well, Wave is based on the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a fascinating development platform that allows you to program in Java and deliver AJAX applications automatically translated (on the client side) into JavaScript. So now it's time for us Python guys to stand in line.

Wave is an amazing demonstration of where the web is going, and our lives are going to be richer for it. It's an entirely new approach to personal communication, and clearly demonstrates that open architectures are (pun intended) the wave of the future. Google are actively looking for people to get involved with the project already.

More later. For now I am too blown away to do much more than sit here thinking about the potential. I am also excited that this represents a bundle of opportunities for the open source world to demonstrate technical leadership. Unless other vendors have come up with some competing web-based technology I'm not aware of, and I'd be happy to learn about that too.

Information about the Wave platform (and, of course, the open source code) is on Google Code. The open Wave protocol details are on a separate site. Look for Wave's public arrival later in the year. Nice job, Google.