Yes, another one bites the dust of Steve Jobs, the same it did not so long ago when it promised to all Mac users that "Windows will never run on a Macintosh computers, EVER!!", well look at you now i'd say to him, you even created an application to let people run Windows on your creature.
Concerning Java, this what i presume will happen, you can't drive away the Java community from mobile devices,it's everywhere, it's too risky, and that could bring not a positive impact on iPhone sales, he wanted to reinvent the phone, ok not doubt in there, but he cannot change the technology we live in, Java is everywhere, i love Java

It is very intersting to notice that articles and blogs on "Java not useful" appearing simultaneous with Adobe's Apollo drumbeat.

Use of Java is very extensive and it is a proven cross-platform runtime. Java developer community is very large. They won't move away from Java and now start learning Flex and Apollo APIs to doing fundamental things such as file access.

Products like dekoh (www.dekoh.com) bring in the best of both to the table. Dekoh is an Ajax-Flash-Java RIA platform for the desktop. I am sure such alternatives would soon provide alternatives to developers and they won't be moving away from Java any soon.

From working inside the mobile phone industry, I can definitely say that Jobs either does not know much about mobile phones, or (more likely) works some smoke and mirrors to hide that Java for the iPhone is not ready yet. Supporting the latest Java MIDP JSR's are one of the primary requirements from all important network operators towards manufacturers, and there has been a definite movement during the last year or so, from supplying a load of games and otherwise a "testing of the waters"-approach, to including business-critical applications and replacing on-line portals with preloaded Java applications and "server frontend" clients.

While Flash and similiar applications certainly has some role to play in a mobile, these systems has a long way to catch up with Java. For several years now, the MIDP specification developement has been led by all large manufacturers and network operators - just a look at the participants in any MIDP JSR is a "who is who" of the mobile phone industry.

During this work, a lot has been accomplished in merging MIDP with current and future network standards, and at the same time adressing the security concerns particular to mobile phones. If you know how quick (or rather the opposite) standardizing work proceeds, you wil realize that this is not easily reproduced by any competitor to Java. And in mobiles standards are not an option (as in general IT), it is the only key to the door.

Anyone who believes that a mobile phone is just a wireless iPod is very much out of touch.

Come on guys, you're smarter than this. Jobs was interviewed about the iPhone, and he was talking about the device, not servers or desktops. Apart from games, I haven't seen a single useful Java app on any mobile phone (or smart phone, or PDA), so Java is just using valuable space on those devices. Jobs is right on the ball-and-chain thing when talking about mobile, definitely.

Get the stupid %&^#@ floating advertisement (that won't go away) off the page.

I'd say the comment is being overblown. Jobs thinks "Nobody uses Java anymore." possibly he's talking about on mobile devices. I don't know about that [mobile devices] but we're all making plenty of money on Java right now and there doesn't seem to be an end to it in the near future. I think the JDK is getting a bit bloated for sure with all the "extras" but that's more a packaging issue than anything else. I wouldn't put it in the ball-and-chain category.

Blue Ray isn't tied to Java. SUN struck a deal to have their VM on every disc. Putting a JavaVM into the Blue-Ray DVD doesn't require OS X to use that as their menu system API. They can override the VM with a Cocoa enabled version of one of the already available standards for Blue Ray:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_Executable_MHP

Cocoa will do just fine and a smaller footprint for OS X.

More to the point, since when does an iPhone have a Blue-Ray DVD drive? It doesn't. That may well be a possibility for the AppleTV as an "add-on" in the arena of appliances. However, since OS X runs the AppleTV then the JavaVM won't be a heavy ball n' chain on that included 40 Gig HD.

We know that Java isn't a ball n' chain for the OS Server Market, but this comment was directed to the possibility of embedding a JavaVM onto the solid state memory in the iPhone. If anything you'll get streamed QuickTime movies which has nothing to do with Blue Ray and hence you don't need Java on the phone. You need Javascript and Flash with SVG.

Dan, do you realize that Java was first released to the public in September of 1997? Flash, which was originally FutureSplash Animator and SmartSketch before that, began in 1993. So...Java is the new, "flash in the pan" technology here (sic). And I can't remember the last time I saw a 20-30 line cryptic error message from a Flash program when visiting a web site...

Dan, do you realize that Java was first released to the public in September of 1997? Flash, which was originally FutureSplash Animator and SmartSketch before that, began in 1993. So...Java is the new, "flash in the pan" technology here (sic). And I can't remember the last time I saw a 20-30 line cryptic error message from a Flash program when visiting a web site...

Jobs is right. Java is a ball and chain. My company uses a travel and expense system built on Java 1.4.2. It won't operate properly unless I disembowel my development machine by removing the Java 6 SE SDK that I'm required to use for the project that pays the bills. That project drags in 120 MB of jar files plus 120 MB of Java 6 SE plus Eclipse 3.2 to build.
Gack! The C++ GUI was under 1 MB of source code
and ran much faster and uses far less memory and disk space. I lament having to keep 5 or 6 JRE environments on my disk to run all the different applications that will only work with a specific release of Java. It's a waste of disk space, network bandwidth to download, CPU horsepower and memory to execute. I'll stick with C and C++ for my critical apps.

We use Java for every application. Applets are irrelevant to what we do. In a blink we were running on Vista. Everyone seems to have their own agenda. To use AJAX, for example, you need Javascript. Supporting a complex commercial application in Javascript is painful, and you have to enable javascript in your browser, which security conscious customers do not want to do. We want long term stability, not the flashiest thing today. Our projects cover decades, not weeks. Will AJAX as we know it be here in 5 years? Flash? or some other latest, greatest thing. Constant change is only good for those who sell to the short sighted.

The reason that we moved from Java to Flash/Flex for our heavyweight RIAs is that we could not get consistant performance from Java/JS based interfaces. There were too many end-user specific environmental problems that did not reveal themselves in the QA process. These don't seem to happen with Flash. It either works (almost always) or it doesn't. It does not crash the user's browser, their machine or produce difficult to diagnose errors.