We all know Oracle can play rough, but this is just beyond anything I've ever seen from the company. It borders on spiteful. Observe as Oracle calls Autonomy's CEO to the mat. Clearly, Mark Hurd is still upset at HP.

The Apache Software Foundation today received a subpoena to produce documents as they relate to Apache Harmony code appearing in the Android platform, as well as its failed attempt to secure a TCK for Java SE, in the Oracle v. Google lawsuit.

Apache's statement can be read here.

My goodness, a lot happened this weekend, didn't it? I mean, outside of Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Yemen, Jordan... Did I miss any countries in there?

Perhaps the biggest for you, dear readers, is this blog posting from Mark Reinhold. In it, he states that himself, John Duimovich and Jason Gartner of IBM, Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse, professor Doug Lea of SUNY Oswego, and Adam Messinger of Oracle are drafting a new take on OpenJDK governance. The initial governance board--while made up of some rather esteemed and intelligent folks--hasn't exactly been active. Reinhold insinuates in his blog posting that the initial OpenJDK governance board has completed its tenure, as he thanks them for their service.

This first draft of new governance rules should be available soon, wrote Reinhold. While governance on the OpenJDK is good news, two very bad things happened this weekend, as well.

By now, you've already heard about Intel. This historically reliable company is just about as predictable as the phases of the moon: it hits or exceeds both product shipment deadlines and earnings predictions every quarter. But the Sandy Bridge processor is a complex beast, and along the way, an engineer or two made a mistake. It sounds like this will delay Sandy Bridge for a month or so. Everyone building with Sandy Bridge will likely have to spend some time reworking schedules, if they haven't already.

Another bit of bad news comes from SourceForge, which was hit by hackers. The consequences are a recommended password reset for all users, the possible removal of CVS services from the site, and a massive write-up describing the entire incident. Everyone needs to check in on their projects ASAP, if for no other reason than to change your password.

Finally, the biggest news of all, for any of you doing Web development in JavaScript: JQuery 1.5 is out. Everyone should check out the changes written up in the blog entry to see what's new, or just download the actual code and dive right in.

Just a quick note to point everyone toward the blog work of Pelegri, who has posted a thorough tabulation of just what Oracle has done with all of the open source projects it inherited from Sun. Main take-away? Only VirtualBox remains unmolested, and from what I hear, it remains a very useful and popular free tool. Everything else? Not so much...

So let's get one thing clear: Oracle OpenWorld/JavaOne is huge. There are no empty hotel rooms in the city. The cabbies are flush with airport money, and the downtown San Francisco area is flooded with PeopleSoft coders, Java developers, database administrators, and more suits than you can shake a briefcase at. And through it all, there is still the annual drama. At this point, however, the drama is well known and not worth covering.

Instead, the real story of the show is the future of Java. And now, we have those juicy details we've all be looking for since Oracle closed the purchase deal for Sun. The answer to everyones question is: Oracle is going with plan B. That's Mark Reinhold's plan B. This plan forgoes some of the more development intensive features of JDK 7 in favor of a release next year. And that's great news.

Plan B stipulates that JDK 7 move ahead to completion without Lambda, Jigsaw, and part of Coin. That means we'll have to wait until 2012 and JDK 8 to get closures, some syntax and behavior enhancements, and a more modular underpinning for Java itself. I think we can all live without those for now. After all, JDK 7 will still have new cryptography handlers, a complete take on Unicode, better structural support for languages running on top of the JVM, and better support for concurrency. Those sound like compelling reasons to upgrade.

Charles Nutter, of the JRuby team, has the single best take on the Oracle versus Google lawsuit. His lengthy analysis of the situation explains everything quite thoroughly. Charles gets extra bonus points for using Miguel de Icaza and Mono as an example of how to be more open. And he absolutely nails the "What does this mean for Java?" question.

Well it's obviously not great to have two Java heavyweights bickering like schoolchildren, and it would be positively devastating if Android were obliterated because of this. But I think the real damage will be in how the developer community perceives Java, rather than in any lasting impact on the platform itself.

Oracle updated NetBeans to version 6.9 today. Here's the list of new features and updates, straight from Oracle's mouth:

·         NetBeans IDE 6.9 introduces JavaFX Composer, a visual editor and layout tool for building JavaFX applications.

·         With JavaFX Composer, organizations can quickly build, visually edit, and debug Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and bind components to various data sources, including databases and Web services.

·         NetBeans IDE 6.9 also offers OSGi interoperability, enabling developers to easily create OSGi bundles for applications based on the NetBeans Platform.

·         NetBeans IDE 6.9 enables developers to rapidly create web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications using the Java platform, JavaFX and scripting languages. 

·         NetBeans IDE 6.9  is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Oracle Solaris.

·         NetBeans IDE 6.9 provides improved editing and development capabilities, including:

o        Improved Java language editing with more than 80 new “hints”, to enhance developer productivity.

o        Additional support for Java Enterprise Edition 6, including Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) and JSR-299.

o        New JavaFX Composer enables visual editing of form-based user interfaces.

o        Enhanced JavaFX script editing and refactoring.

o        Support for CSS code completion, find usages, and renaming capabilities for HTML and CSS.

o        The ability to quickly code, test, and deploy OSGi bundles using Maven and Felix.

o        Bundled Felix container with the ability to deploy other containers, such as Equinox.

o        Support for the Spring 3.0 framework; PHP Zend framework, as well as better PHP formatting and code completion; Ruby on Rails 3.0 and specification of which gems the IDE should reference.

That's a lot of interoperability stuff. It's very nice to see that Oracle has taken Sun away from its cloistered former ways. Traditionally, NetBeans has been a super star in Sun environments, but when compared to Eclipse, it's always lagged behind in its support of 3rd party tools and languages. If Oracle keeps this up, they might just get NetBeans up to snuff for more than just straight Java users. Good to see that Oracle isn't short-changing the NetBeans team.

For those of you in the Java world, my colleague Alex Handy has confirmed that there will be a JavaOne this year. Alex reports that it will be co-located this year with Oracle OpenWorld, which is scheduled for Sept. 19-23 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, home to JavaOne for many years now. Neither the OpenWorld Web site nor last year's JavaOne site make mention of this, and it will be interesting to see if the same members of the Java ecosystem support the event now that it appears Oracle will own Sun well before then.