Two exciting announcements from Oracle the last few days:

• JCP.Next – Oracle Proposes Changes to JCP: Enforced transparency (open mailing lists, open issue trackers); and greater throughput (more frequent JSR updates, and deactivating JSRs when they stop making progress): who could ask for more?  The closed nature of many JSR mailing lists, and the slow progress of too many interesting JSRs has been a plague on the Java landscape for years.
• JRockit is now free: Not only is JRockit free (as in beer, not in speech), but JRockit technology is being merged into the current OpenJDK such that soon, Hotspot and JRockit will converge into one Oracle JDK.  Awesome news on both fronts; by all reports, after a suitable warmup period, JRockit is way faster than Hotspot.  So today, JRockit is available under the same licensing terms as Hotspot; and tomorrow (or soon, anyway) the two VMs will become one!

All in all I am very happy with how Oracle has managed Java.  They brought order to the Java 7 quagmire, introducing real JSRs for Java 7 and Java 8 into the bargain.  They just seem to have a sense of purpose and direction that I hadn’t sensed from Sun for years.