If IBM does in fact buy Sun, which according to the WSJ they are in talks to do, I believe that will officially be the first nail in the coffin for JAVA and its legions of downstream vendors. The language itself has been a mature (if not slightly legacy) technology since Sun lost significant market value and stopped trying to compete directly with Microsoft’s .NET. Spring, struts, and all the other major improvements made to JAVA has been done by third parties for some time. Sun went so far as to public source the language awhile back hoping to keep their costs down while still fostering innovation in that product space. I’m no JAVA junkie, but I have not seen much come from that open source licensing effort that has significantly impacted the software development industry. To me, the idea of IBM throwing a ton of resources on JAVA technologies is optimistic at best.

Update: IBM decided against buying Sun Microsystems which is probably good for both Sun and IBM. Oracle then moved in and snatched up Sun less than a week later. This will be a much healthier relationship for both parties involved and may spur some badly needed innovation in the JAVA space. Still yet that might not translate to better business solutions unless you are running Oracle databases.