The Android lawsuit between Oracle and Google is being well covered elsewhere, so I won't repeat that here. What I am interested in however is the effect on the Java developer community. Will Oracle lead Java to a new high and new interest as it prepares to defend the language, or will it be seen as a money grabbing, pillaging entity? There are already talks of Android moving away from Java altogether - is that even possible at this stage?
Java is still being taught in universities and schools around the world but has lost mind-share to the increasingly popular .Net framework from Microsoft. In addition new languages such as Ruby and existing languages such as Python are all proving very popular for web development.
New languages are springing up and I'm personally happy to see Nvidia's CUDA taught at universities - a language aimed at using the massively parallel nature of GPU's for calculations (always liked massively parallel problems for stretching programmers).
It seems to me we'll see a heterogeny of languages in the future and hopefully multi-skilled programmers appearing out of university. What will this mean for large scale enterprise solutions? It seems to me that Java will still be there but actually it feels as if it is moving into a legacy language state, the cobol of the next decade. Java needs some love - will Oracle provide a nurturing environment or will one of the many new languages rising up serve as the futures alternative to the .Net framework?
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